Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Space, Wheatley decided, was cold and dark and very, very unpleasant.

Of course, this was no new revelation for him. In fact, he’d come to that conclusion within the first few days of being stuck in space, and it had been years, he supposed, since he’d seen anything other than the moon, the stars, or the tantalizing far-off spot of blue and green that was Earth-

“Space. I’m in space.”

-with the exception of Space Core. At least one of them liked the situation, was content to stare into the star-filled void for days on end, babbling incessantly about stars and meteors and the like. Wheatley himself would have rather fancied a chat, just a quick one, maybe, but he could never seem to get a coherent response. He had tried, mind you, several times - even going so far as to try and strike up a conversation on the occasional interesting star or piece of space junk, but no, nothing worked.

It was very quiet up here, save for the other core’s rambling over the radio channels every Aperture device was conveniently built with, the kind of quiet that was perfect for a long, long reflection on all the mistakes you’d ever made and just how terrible you were. Not to mention anything specific, of course, the silence just invited thinking about how you’d failed at everything in general. Wheatley hated it, hated every spiral of self-doubt he ended up falling into, except he knew every disheartening thought he had towards himself was correct. That was a surprise, given, well, what he’d been designed to do, and that one thought in particular got him talking again. To himself, of course. It was always to himself.

“Don’t- don’t think about that,” he mumbled, staring at the blurry Earth blob in the distance. He slid his shutters closed, blocking out the view, and considered going into sleep mode again. It could save some power, at least, and skip a bit of boredom and the inevitable thoughts that would follow, and, well - he was still clinging onto the hope that he’d get out of here, down from here and back to Earth, if only just to see the surface. It was ironic, really, how he could stare at the surface all the time from up here and not be able to see what it really looked like.

“So much space. Gotta see it all.”

“Alright, mate, heard you the first time, and- and the few hundred times after that, thanks,” he responded, not really paying attention. There were other things on his mind at the moment, blending together in a mad whirlwind. He sighed, reminding himself that all of the circumstances that had lead to him being here were, no doubt about it, utterly and completely his fault. A flash of her betrayed face came back to him in startling clarity, which only served to make himself feel even worse.

“I could apologize to her, too, can’t believe I forgot about that,” Wheatley said, half-opening his lower shutter. It caught on something and sent a jolt through his shell. He winced, reminded of the little sparks that had darted across his shell when he was Back There. Here, in space, there were no sparks, but the pain from several of his haphazardly fixed components remained sharp and biting. “You know what I’d say? I’d say I’m sorry. That I’m truly sorry. I was horrible, and monstrous, and- and-“

His voice freezed up again, glitching a little. It had been doing so for days now, going on the fritz every now and then, and he nervously checked his battery percentage for the fourth time in as many hours. It was at twenty-three percent. Wheatley sighed, falling quiet. He’d begun to do that more often, he noticed, and he didn’t like it. Running out of words to say felt like yet another letdown, failing at the one thing he was even remotely close to being good at. Another apology wouldn’t hurt, he reckoned, and was thinking of a way to change it up when something rather painful smashed into him from the side.

Wheatley yelped, cracked optic shrinking to a tiny circle. “What- what was that?” He flailed his handles, glancing desperately towards where the object had came from, and caught sight of what looked like a small rocket. It had a very familiar logo stencilled on it, unmistakable, and as soon as he saw it he flinched in fear - but more importantly, it was still moving, and in precisely the direction he would like for it to not be moving, which was directly towards him. Panic took over within seconds, in all its hysterical glory, driving him back into the familiar groove of talking excessively and particularly to things which paid him no attention and gave him no response.

“Stop- stop it, please, oh, God, I don’t want to go back,” he said in a high-pitched incoherent rush of words, so fast that a bystander listening in on the radio channels would have heard the rough equivalent of a staticky, indecipherable screech. Wheatley looked back and forth, frantically, and caught sight of a similar rockety thing nudging Space Core in the same direction. “O-oh, are you taking us both- both back, that is what you’re doing, ow-“ Another prod. “-in that case, could you- could you slow down a bit, maybe, room for negotiation heaaAAHH-“

A particularly violent shove sent him spinning handle-over-handle, and he dragged his optical lids shut, feeling sick, and not just from the dizzying sight of blue and white and gray and black whirling across his vision. Most of it was undoubtedly because he knew, something deep down was telling him and he knew he knew he was going back to That Place and there was nothing he could do about it.

0~~~~~0

A flash of movement caught Chell’s eye over in the wheat fields, and she whipped her head around, frowning. She squinted, but she’d already lost sight of whatever it was, and only a rippling expanse of yellow presented itself to her. It was probably nothing - a wild animal, most likely - but even after five years, her senses were hard-wired to react to anything even remotely near That Place. Chell shivered, involuntarily, reminding herself that she would never have to go there again, that testing was done and dusted, that She had let her go enjoy her freedom.

“It’s been fun. Don’t come back.”

The sound of a sharp whistle cut through her thoughts, jerking her mind out of that dark cold place and back to the warm sunlight. Mel raised eyebrows at her, pointing to the hole in the roof, and Chell looked down to see she’d let go of the tarp she was supposed to be stretching over it. “Sorry,” she said, wincing as the whole sheet of plastic flopped to the ground. It felt unnatural to hear the sound of her own voice, and dangerous to use it so close to Aperture, yet also freeing, in a way.

Mel rolled her eyes and shoved Chell good-naturedly, although lightly - falling two stories was no joke. Chell watched her friend climb down to retrieve it, but couldn’t resist throwing a backwards glance at the tiny speck of gray on the horizon, the dinky little shed she’d stumbled out of, because she was sure she had seen something move there and if she’d seen correctly, it couldn’t mean anything good.

They were soon finished with their haphazard repair of the roof, the bright blue tarp pinned down across the edges of the hole and slung over the top so rain wouldn’t get in. It was hard work, and Chell considered not for the first time asking someone from the city to come down and fix up the easily-damaged house - but no, that wasn’t an option. The burden of knowledge rested on her back, even now, filled with visions of clean white tiles. Both she and Mel agreed they couldn’t let anyone else find out about Aperture and wind up stuck there, or worse. The facility was an active explosive, and neither of them wanted to set it off.

As for Mel, Chell knew she’d also escaped from the facility. From what Mel had told her, she’d started living here only about a month before GLaDOS let Chell walk out, and much like her, she’d run into a personality core, but the details remained a mystery. The two worked together and lived together and were great friends, had given each other the basic rundown of how they’d gotten out, but - very reasonably, Chell thought - kept the finer points of their own stories to themselves. Mel evidently hadn’t seen much of Her, and Chell had never heard of whatever security system Mel had faced off with, but they both laughed about the similarities of their escapes on the rare occasion they felt brave enough to discuss the topic.

Later, she fed the chickens, idly noting that they’d have to take another trip up to Upper Michigan for supplies - chicken feed, yeast and baking powder, writing paper and pencils for Mel. Maybe they’d bring some vegetables from the garden to barter with, or apples from the scraggly trees that had just started producing fruit, but most of their goods would again be vintage computers and spare parts. If there was anything half-decent about living in the broken remains of Aperture’s twentieth-century businesstown, it was the sheer volume of now-ancient tech that they could sell off to stay alive. Of course, Aperture being Aperture, most of it still looked almost brand new, just like the panelled test chambers or - her face hardened a little, almost imperceptibly - the personality cores.

Chell looked up at the stretch of sky blue on the roof, hating that the color reminded her so much of that cracked-down-the-middle honeycomb optic. Most of her anger had faded - five years was a long time, after all - and she couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him, given that he was stranded in space. If he was here, yes, she’d probably kick him farther than the moon, but she had to admit at least a part of her had forgiven him. Her body had poisoned his mind, driven him mad chasing after the solution euphoria, and Chell knew he wasn’t fully at fault for what had happened. Even so-

“AM I BEING TOO VAGUE? I. DESPISE. YOU. I LOATHE YOU. YOU ARROGANT, SMUGLY QUIET, AWFUL, JUMPSUITED MONSTER OF A WOMAN.”

He glared down at her from where he hung from the chassis, optic narrowed in anger. His voice sounded cold, off, filled with undertones of bitterness and hatred, not at all like the ever-cheerful rambling waterfall of words she’d grown so used to even during their brief partnership. It was so different from how it had been even just a few minutes before she’d pushed the button to initiate core transfer, before he’d been shoved into the mainframe. She looked up at him and she felt her chest tighten in raw pain because why was he doing this she helped him she did everything he asked and now he was blaming her but she hadn’t done anything and something was wrong, something was very very wrong-

-she hoped she’d never see him again. The memory, the pain of betrayal had stuck with her, making her hesitant to trust Mel at first, skittish around people in the bustling markets. It hadn’t helped that he was the first kind voice she remembered, either. The notion of giving up had never crossed Chell’s mind - Her scornful words had only fueled her drive - but when he turned on her, she had felt a deep, burning ache, a sense of hopelessness that might have come awfully close. She hadn’t listened to it, though, barreling on like she always did, and she was lucky for that because otherwise she’d likely have become ashes in an incinerator or a smudge of red on tiles. Chell averted her eyes, turning towards the house instead.

Mel had found it, originally, and when Chell showed up most of the trash was cleared out, so they’d slowly repaired it until it was livable, which wasn’t too hard given the unnatural shelf life of most Aperture materials. Looking at it always brought her a sense of fulfilment and success - after all, she and Mel had worked on it for the first year, turning a collapsed wreck of a building into a neat two-floor structure crouched just a little away from the border of the wheat field. The smell of bread burning drifted from the window, and Chell snickered slightly, picturing her friend rushing around the kitchen while frantically fanning the oven.

Soon enough, Mel whistled for help, opening the front door and waving frantically. Chell stood up, dusting her hands to get the last of the seeds off, and started towards the house. It was getting late. The sun was crawling slowly down the horizon, painting the sky a beautiful mix of orange and blue - the colors weren’t unlike repulsion and propulsion gel, she noticed - and the dying rays turned the wheat fields golden. A streak of light caught her eye, and she glanced skyward. Shooting stars. They seemed awfully close. Chell paid them no further mind, hurrying as the smell of smoke intensified.

Against all Chell’s suspicions, GLaDOS hadn’t tried to drag her back. Life here was simple, scavenging the ruined town, tending to the overgrown garden and the chickens, with the occasional venture into the wheat fields, and Chell liked it just fine.

0~~~~~0

Tammy tripped and fell, throwing her hands out to catch herself, and ended up sprawled in wheat for the third time that day. The stalks pricked at her arms, squishing uncomfortably underneath her apron, and she winced as a few poked her injured arm. So far, the outside world was decidedly terrible - okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely correct, it was marginally better than the inside of Aperture.

“You okay down there?” Colin said, trying and failing to stop grinning as Tammy got to her feet and glared at him. “Cool it, Tim-Tams. You know,” he continued, “I’d have thought someone assigned to a testing track where all you do is run around on gels would be a little more coordinated.”

She dusted her hands on her apron, trying to avoid the gel-soaked spots. “That’s not fair. In Aperture, the floor’s flat. Easy to run on. This,” she said, gesturing to the rolling field, “is not.”

“So you didn’t have to step over broken metal every two seconds? Lucky!” he remarked, keeping the obnoxious grin plastered on his face. “Guess you missed out on the full testing experience.” His eyes betrayed worry, though - he evidently hadn’t forgotten about the injuries she’d sustained, and it looked like his wrenched shoulder was still giving him trouble.

“I was testing with gels,” Tammy pointed out, but Colin was already distracted, staring at a swatch of dark green on the horizon. “That’s a forest,” he stated. “So this field doesn’t go on forever! I was starting to get worried.” He was already walking ahead, and Tammy hurried to catch up to him. Her fingers curled reflexively, reaching for the propulsion gel control, and she had to slap her arm a few times to unclench it from the familiar position. Not on the testing track anymore. Get a hold of yourself! The gel gun was lying somewhere in the depths of Aperture, wherever things went when they fell from the precarious network of catwalks, next to Colin’s portal gun. No more propulsion gel. She almost missed being able to move a little quicker.

“I hate this,” she muttered, trudging after him. Her muscles ached, her mind felt fuzzy from sleep deprivation, and the last flecks of gel clinging to her hands stung slightly. She squinted at the hazy green, deciding it was much too far away for her liking and that all things considered, she’d rather just lie down and go to sleep.

“Come on, we spent so much time trying to get out!” Colin said with mock offense. “You might as well enjoy it. Sooner or later we’ll run across some other people, although it’s probably, like, a thousand years in the future. Anyway, bound to find someone sooner or later.”

“Unless everyone’s dead,” Tammy said neutrally. She kicked a rock and winced as her bruised side twinged. Walking or any kind of physical movement was, ironically, not her strong suit. Yeah, she’d been running around constantly, sliding on propulsion gel and jumping with repulsion gel, but she didn’t have to like it. From the stitched-together patchwork of memories she had, she’d been a painter, maybe a graphics designer, at Aperture before they shoved her into a relaxation chamber for- well, a long time. She wasn’t entirely sure - time had obscured sounds and blurred faces - but she remembered brushstrokes on canvas and flashes of color on a screen. It didn’t matter anyway. Now, everyone she knew was probably dead, and her only friend was a terribly loud and annoying fellow test subject.

Still, she had to give him some credit. Getting out of the facility had been a joint effort, and the faking-their-deaths bit really was all him. Tammy wasn’t fully convinced it had worked, but either way, they were out - no point dwelling on it, right? It wasn’t as if - whats-her-name, GLaDOS, wasn’t it - could reach them up here, and Nigel himself had seemed fully unconcerned about letting a rogue test subject or two rampage around trying to find an exit. They hadn’t seen much of Colin’s speed-obsessed test associate either.

“If we hurry, we can probably make it there before it gets dark,” Tammy said, speeding up a little and falling in step with the taller test subject. She glanced up - the sun was already setting, and the first few stars were shining. It was a breathtaking view. The meticulously designed panels she’d seen on that last gel test paled in comparison. Her steps slowed unconsciously, until she was standing still, gazing up at the cold brilliance. She heard Colin’s footsteps pause, and then his voice, unusually quiet.

“I had a little brother,” he said, almost in a whisper. “You know, back before- well, everything. He’s probably long dead, but- he loved space. Obsessed with it, actually, wanted to be an astrophysicist. I used to take him stargazing.”

Tammy heard his voice crack, glancing at him, and found his eyes bright with tears. A somber silence settled over them, interrupted only by the rustling of stalks. Colin sniffed, then swiped an arm across his face and was back to his familiar cheerful self in a moment, though his smile was a little forced. “We should keep going, it’s-“

He broke off the sentence as Tammy hugged him. For a moment, she wondered if she’d crossed a line, but then his shoulders shook and he leaned against her for comfort. Tammy felt sorry for him - she had it easier, not remembering her parents’ faces or if she had any family. It was painful not knowing, but it must hurt more to realize you were never going to see your loved ones again. Still… she wished she had someone to miss.

“Thanks,” he said after a while, running a hand through his curly hair and mussing it up before smiling gratefully.

Tammy immediately whacked him, avoiding his injured shoulder.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“There are giant human-eating rats out here,” she said cheerily, impatience creeping around the edges of her voice. Not really, as far as Nigel’s information went those were only down in the deepest parts of Aperture, but he didn’t need to know that. “But sure, if you want to stick around any longer-“

“Point taken, crystal clear, let’s keep moving,” Colin said hurriedly. The reddened sky was quickly being overtaken by black, and only a few wispy clouds drifted by, allowing them an unobscured view of the stars. Tammy winced as something went rrRRRRrrrr in the distance. They kept walking, speeding up every time a strange sound reached their ears - which was frequently - until Tammy squinted, saw a thin trail of smoky gray, and promptly tripped again.

“Seriously, what is with you and falling over?” groaned Colin as she got up for the fourth time. Tammy ignored his comment, instead sprinting forward, eyes screwed up, trying to make out whether she’d seen correctly - yes, it was there, unmistakably, smoke drifting up into the sky, and just below it the telltale flicker of light that meant-

“Look,” she started, but Colin had already seen and then within seconds they were both sprinting forward, desperation lending them speed. Colin’s feet caught on the ground for the first time, and Tammy helped him back up, and then the exhaustion that had been clouding at the edges of her vision caught up and socked her in the stomach, so they adopted a slightly limping gait, each leaning on the other, making agonizingly slow progress towards the house.

Colin lifted his head and drew in a long breath. Curious, Tammy did the same, and the smell of rosemary and roast potatoes and bread hit her at full strength, fueling her aching body. Together, they stumbled closer, and then Colin’s knees gave out and they ended up slumped on the doorstep. He raised a fist and banged once, twice, three times on the door, and the sound of someone speaking ceased abruptly, and then they had no choice but to wait and hope that maybe, maybe there was someone there.

Footsteps from inside, and then someone peered out - a kind-eyed woman with red hair tied neatly up in a bun.

“Hi,” Tammy managed. Colin flashed his signature grin.

“Can we come in?”

Chapter Text

The voice came from everywhere at once, monotone and menacing, and Wheatley flinched as soon as he heard it.

“Hello, moron.” She said. “How have you been holding up? I hope you enjoyed your time in space.”

“N-no, I didn’t, really, cheers for asking,” Wheatley stuttered, frightened out of his wits. His vocal processor jammed up again, forcing him into silence. Something felt wrong, and not just the sheer paralysing terror he felt at hearing Her voice or the fact he was Back Here. He risked cracking open his optic, tried to move his handles, then realized he was in what appeared to be a cylindrical glass tube. The floor consisted of interlocking gray panels, like a cube dropper. There wasn’t a terrible amount of space in here, and his arms were nearly touching the walls-

Wait.

He didn’t have arms! He was a core, for goodness’ sake! Wheatley glanced down, perplexed, and was met with the sight not just his own familiar handles but also what appeared to be four fully-functional limbs. He yelped, flailing, and ended up slamming into the glass - rather forcefully, in fact.

“Oh, good. You haven’t even been active in an Aperture Science Core Mobility Unit for two minutes, and you’ve already managed to fall over. I guess you really are the dumbest moron who ever lived.”

“I’m not a moron,” Wheatley hissed, then immediately regretted it - the floor lurched violently, panels shifting all around just outside the tube. He tried moving a leg, found it to have no immediate damaging consequences, then commenced attempts to stand upright. After quite a while, he succeeded, leaning heavily against the wall and glaring around to try and catch sight of any cameras.

“You know, a thank you would be nice. I was really considering leaving you in the room where all the robots scream at you. But then I thought, why not give the moron a chance to do a little bit of testing? I’m sure you understand.”

There was a cheerful little beep, and then suddenly a voice was ringing through the room, Wheatley’s voice but then somehow not his at the same time. He looked up in shock.

“I’m going to watch, and you’re going to test, and everything is going to be… just… fine.”

A beat of silence.

“That was an accident. After all, even you aren’t enough of a moron to throw your only friend onto a testing track.” A pause. “Oh wait. You are.”

“I am NOT-“ He started, then stopped, guilt and horror flooding his circuits. He had done that, hadn’t he? Even now, when he was back on Earth - the very thing he’d wished for all that time up in space! - all he was doing was thinking about his own selfish desire to escape. God, he hadn’t even considered finding her and apologizing! Wheatley slumped as best he could in this Core Mobility Unit whatsit, realizing that being sorry was all well and good when you had nothing else to think about, and entirely different when you could actually do something about it.

“Don’t look so sad. In fact, I’ve decided to give you a partner to test with. After all, you wouldn’t solve a single room on your own.” She hummed cheerfully. “I will warn you, the first room does have acid. Don’t fall in. I can’t be bothered backing you up, so if at first you don’t succeed? You fail. And die.”

Testing. He was going to be testing. Wheatley stared outside, watching cubes and turrets fly past in tubes of their own. What was he even supposed to do now? Get out of here. He had to do that first. Then he could - he could move by himself now, he could find her and say sorry! He’d said sorry so many times while in space, surely he had enough experience in that area. He just had to get out. As for how he was going to do that, well, he wasn’t having any particularly bright ideas.

“By the way, if you fall in the acid, you will die. I thought that was obvious enough, but then I remembered how much of a moron you are.”

That dreaded word snapped him back to attention, and Wheatley resumed his furious search for a camera to direct his raging, clawing, hurting anger at, and then the floor dropped from beneath him and he tumbled down the tube with a shriek of surprise. It bent a little way down, and he slammed painfully into the glass with a crunch, rolling and sliding to a stop. He groaned, handles twitching - one of them had been crushed underneath him, and it was screaming all sorts of warnings.

“Ouch- that- that bloody hurt, hurt quite a lot there-“ he muttered to himself, trying his best to ignore Her sinister laughter. “Can- can I get some diagnostics, here? Think that might be damaged, yes it is- says right here, damage at 67%, that does not look good at all.” He twitched, sparks flying from that familiar crushed part in his shell. Something in his damaged optic had been knocked aside, widening the crack down the middle slightly, and he felt sick at the jarring double-vision. “Think I’m seeing two of that cube over there. Not good, not good.”

The cube in question looked as if it had been blown apart, half of it torn away and the rest sitting discarded on a ledge. Wheatley instantly thought of the frankenturrets - I thought they were a good idea, it WAS a good idea, wasn’t it? - a shudder spreading through the mobility unit as he did so. “Am I- am I going to just be sitting down here? Because that’s perfectly fine- all good on my end, over here, sitting in a tube, not testing at all, sounds perfect to me- I mean horrible! Absolutely bloody terrible, doing nothing, seems like the proper punishment for little ol’ Wheatley, doesn’t it-“

“Did I forget to turn the air current on? Don’t worry. Core Mobility Units are all fitted with long-fall boots, so I’m sure you’ll be perfectly unharmed by any of the numerous falls you’re bound to have. As long as you remember to land on your feet.”

There was a little ting, and then Wheatley was sucked upwards through the tube, hitting another bend on the way. The impact was jarring, worse than before, but thankfully nothing vital seemed to be damaged. She can’t hurt me too much, she needs me for testing, he had time to think in a morbidly relieved sort of way, and then he rushed out of the end of the tube and crashed rather forcefully into the floor.

“Welcome to the Cooperative Testing Initiative. Today, you will be testing with a partner. Adventure Core, feel free to kick the moron around as you see fit.”

…Adventure Core?

As soon as Wheatley got to his feet, a well-placed punch hit him right in the optic. He collapsed back to the floor, a fresh wave of pain rolling through his circuits, and managed to shakily look up at the form of a familiar-looking core, also in a mobility unit. Green optic, with a rectangle of black right in the center, and man alive, he did not look happy.

0~~~~~0

Mel was a very sensible person. She prided herself on being practical, which was why, upon waking up in the depths of Aperture Science to find everything in a state of collapse, she’d shelved the shock and doubt and focused her entire attention on getting out of there. Her clear-headed problem solving was the reason why she had beat AEGIS and escaped with the help of Virgil. Efficiency and logical reasoning, those were her master tools - but she had never lost her overwelming streak of kindness, and it showed when Chell stumbled across her house five years ago.

So when she opened the front door and was met with the sight of two humans - actual living, breathing, other people - the instinct to help immediately shut down the little warning lights going off at the Aperture logos stencilled on their clothing and the long fall boots strapped to their legs.

“Hi,” one of them said in a strained tone - a girl, young-looking, couldn’t have been more than halfway through her twenties at most. She was holding her side and grimacing, evidently injured.

The other spoke next - a boy, around the same age, curly-haired and grinning profusely. “Can we come in?”

Mel weighed her options. On one hand, they had evidently come from Aperture, which couldn’t mean anything good. On the other hand, they were injured, looked exhausted from testing, and were likely starving and sleep-deprived from extended reliance on adrenal vapors. She smiled kindly, and held the door open for them, offering a hand to the boy to help him up when he stumbled.

She closed the door behind them and hastily scribbled a note, tearing it off the pad and handing it to them. Wait here. The boy offered thanks and leaned against the wall, and the girl slid down and closed her eyes, wincing. Mel turned and poked her head into the dining room, where Chell was pacing restlessly. A short whistle got her attention, and Chell looked up and immediately froze at the sight of the two injured test subjects.

Right. Mel hadn’t thought about how her friend would react.

A waterfall of emotions flickered across Chell’s face. Shock, then anger, then betrayal - Mel hoped it wasn’t directed at her - before finally settling on a more neutral expression with hints of wariness. Chell leaned against the wall, pinching the bridge of her nose, and breathed in, then out.

For the first time in a long while, Mel wished she wasn’t mute. They got along fine with easy gestures and whistles, and the pads of sticky notes she had found around the place were great for carrying a conversation proper, but this - trying to get something across without having to write something down - was out of her capabilities. Mel settled for gesturing to Chell, then the two people behind her, then the motion they had settled on for ‘hurt’. She hoped it was enough.

Chell closed her eyes briefly, then spoke. “Aperture?” It was only one word, but the meaning was crystal clear.

The boy nodded. “Speed Testing Initiative. Name’s Colin.” He tentatively offered Chell a hand to shake. Mel winced as she ignored it outright.

“How did you get out?” Chell’s words were flat and cold, disbelieving.

Colin opened his mouth to reply, but the other test subject cut him off, staggering to her feet. “Threw the guns down a pit. Portal gun-” she nodded at Colin- “and gel gun. GLaDOS either bought it or ignored us.” She coughed. “Don’t particularly care which.” Mel felt a flash of admiration for the girl, although Chell winced slightly at the use of the central core’s proper name.

“Did you run into Her?”

“No.”

“Where did you leave?”

“Abandoned tunnel.”

“Did she-“

Mel stepped in front of Colin and the other test subject. Yes, her friend was only being sensible by questioning them, but they were hurt and tired and Mel was having none of that. She fixed Chell in a firm stare. Later. Chell looked doubtful, but caved, letting Mel help them to the couch. Colin sat down, looking knocked out, and fell asleep almost immediately. Mel retrieved an ice pack, inferring that the girl was holding her side due to bruises, and was relieved to find she was right and it wasn’t something worse - then she realized she still didn’t know her name.

Name? Mel scribbled, holding the sticky note out to the girl. She looked at it for a moment, then up at Mel. “Can’t talk?”

Blunt, but at least she wasn’t trying to sidestep the topic. Mel nodded.

“Tammy,” the test subject replied, then folded her arms over her chest and stared out the window into the darkening field. “Thank you,” she added as an afterthought, but tossed a grateful smile in Mel’s direction. Mel left them alone, then walked back to where Chell was standing. Her friend was keeping a cautious gaze on the pair of test subjects, evidently still distrustful.

Worry was beginning to itch at the back of Mel’s mind, and not just for the people in this room right now - more for the first friend she could remember, the friendly voice that had roused her from the long, long sleep. If the central core was activated - Chell had told her the general details of what had happened during her escape, and she’d thought Virgil would be fine, but looking at the injured test subjects in front of her Mel found it very hard to believe that anywhere in Aperture was remotely safe.

A nagging feeling of guilt came back to her with the knowledge that her actions, shutting down AEGIS, had ultimately brought back GLaDOS - an AI who had always been described to her as a complete and utter tyrant. Mel squashed it immediately, reminding herself that she and Virgil hadn’t known who the security system was really targeting - only that they had been in danger and acted out of fear of losing their lives.

Responsibility flooded her in place of the guilt. Virgil could very well be in danger - he’d gotten her out of Aperture the first time, and she owed him for that, owed him to at least drop in for a quick check to see whether he was okay. Mel wouldn’t mind a chance to talk to him, either. The steady partnership they’d forged to save themselves remained strong, even after years of silence. She hesitated for a few seconds, turning her ridiculous, risky, absolutely terrible idea over in her head, then jotted it down and held the little slip of paper out to Chell.

Thinking about going back. Want to check on Virgil. Nine words, short and to the point. Chell read it, her eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly. “Too dangerous,” she muttered, shooting a glance at the test subjects slumped on the couch. “When She let me out, she said don’t come back.” The words hung in the air between them, tinged with an obvious question. How do you think She will react if you turn up uninvited?

I’ll be careful, she scribbled beneath the original message, trying to convey the urgency she felt. Yes, it was dangerous, and stupid, but Mel’s sense of honor was slowly but surely dragging her towards the idea. She could take her old long-fall boots for safety, go straight back down the way she’d come out, and wander around hoping to run into Virgil. Besides, it had been five years - five years of nothing interesting happening, a quiet, peaceful life - and maybe it was a residual habit from her life as an Olympian so many years ago, but Mel was positively itching for an adventure.

Chell ran a hand through her hair, looking uncomfortable. A thought occurred to Mel, and she added another sentence. Come with me? I could use backup if things go wrong.

As soon as Chell scanned the words, her face twisted in a scowl. “No. You said you’ll be careful, and I’m not going back there. I’m nobody’s rescue squad.”

Ouch, Mel thought, but didn’t push it. Chell had evidently had a much worse experience down in the facility than she had - she’d figured that much from observing her friend flinch at the sight of the Aperture-branded devices they sometimes found in the ruins - and Mel got that she still didn’t understand Virgil had been truly friendly. Chell had never provided the full story on her own escape, but from the parts she did reveal she’d been betrayed by a personality core. If she didn’t want to walk into - well, obvious danger - for the sake of a core she’d never met, Mel wasn’t going to try and convince her to.

“I won’t stop you, but I’m not coming.” Chell glanced at Colin and Tammy. “Someone has to watch these two.”

I’ll try and be back in a day. It won’t take long.

Mel hoped she was right.

0~~~~~0

Down in Aperture Science, Virgil was having what was definitely one of the most boring days of his life. Which was a pretty bold statement to make, considering said life spanned well over a thousand years at this point. He’d lost track somewhere along the way and besides, he didn’t really need to know how long it had been.

The morning had been uneventful. Glitchy had come in for repairs again, but other than that his maintenance wing and testing track were peaceful and quiet. Just how he liked it, usually, except today there were no errors whatsoever and everything was functioning exactly as it should. The alarm system he’d set up was working fine, which was a surprise given how often it went on the fritz. The maintenance core had come up with the concept for it on a whim one day, after peering into one of the abandoned offices and getting a stark reminder of the time he’d spent on the floor down in Old Aperture, and had set it up in all the places near management rails. Complete with wifi. He was very, very proud of it.

It wasn’t all blue skies and sunshine, though - he hadn’t found time to replace all of his tools, and he was still waiting on Her to get around to fixing the half-destroyed room - the years and years of neglect after a test subject shut Her down, coupled with the fiasco after some core had decided to go rogue and take over the facility, had left most of Aperture in a complete and utter shambles. It was frankly disappointing, and a relief that the very same test subject had, he heard, managed to put the central core back in her proper position. Although, lately… She was almost always preoccupied with tending to a trio of extremely messy and annoying birds, or shouting at the test associate cores. Not that Virgil minded! Maintenance work was much more relaxing when you knew She wasn’t constantly watching.

Thinking about test subjects tore him unexpectedly back to mulling over one in particular. Mel. It had been a long time - what, five years and a bit? - since they parted ways, and he was still grateful. Come to think of it, Virgil kind of missed her. He wondered where she’d gone - to the best of his knowledge, there was nothing up there except a particularly large field of wheat and an old, abandoned town that hadn’t been used since Aperture’s glory days. Maybe she was living there now, or maybe she was lying dead in a ditch somewhere. He shuddered, deciding to clear his mind of that thought in particular.

Virgil was in the middle of busying himself with mundane sidetasks when the alarm system picked up movement near the AEGIS wing. His upper shutter lowered slightly in exasperation - it was probably another core who’d fallen off that blasted faulty rail. He needed to get around to fixing that sometime.

Actually, he wasn’t entirely sure why he hadn’t gone and patched it up the first time ‘Onathan had taken a dive off the end while spouting self-absorbed rubbish. He told himself, yet again, that the Ego Core could use a bit of well-deserved humiliation, but a nagging voice in his circuits said no, that isn’t true, and he reluctantly conceded. It was probably because every time he went back there, he looked up at the horrifying deactivated spider-like chassis and instantly found himself-

“The computer is known as the 'Aperture Employee Guardian and Intrusion System,' or AEGIS for short.”

“Toxic goo from Testing Track Lima Whiskey contact with Enrichment Center Sub-basement Level 10. Flooding procedures commencing.”

-worrying about toxic goo and certain death, that was it. Virgil told himself that was ridiculous - AEGIS was deactivated, had been for ages! He sent a notification to Her that he would need ATLAS or P-body’s assistance and set off on the management rail.

“Hello, ah, does anyone need help?” he called out once the familiar A symbol came into view. This particular section of the facility hadn’t been touched during the central core’s repair efforts - She’d prioritized fixing up New Aperture’s more vital systems and cleaning up the damage done to the reactor. Virgil was glad for that. If She decided to dig around the recordings of Virgil and Mel taking down AEGIS, there would certainly be a lot of questions most likely ending with a trip to the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator, and he liked being alive, thank you very much.

The broken rail was down near the turret production line, but Virgil checked the alarm system and noticed that movement wasn’t coming from over there. Rather, it was coming from the room with the escape elevator to the surface. That was strange - the sole management rail there had been fine the last time he checked. Which did happen to be a few years ago.

Virgil rolled in on the rail, expecting to see a fellow sphere stuck on the floor. Instead, he came face-to-face with a very familiar-looking red-haired human. A test subject. Except this time, she wasn’t wearing an Aperture-branded jumpsuit.

“Mel?” he said slowly. “Is that really you? My optic isn’t tricking me?”

She nodded, smiling brightly at him and reaching up a hand to tap his lower handlebar. Lower shutter raised in a smile, Virgil tapped back - almost like a peculiar human-to-core high-five - before his common sense took over, accompanied by a good shot of panic.

“What are you doing here? It’s not safe! Did you fall back in? Come on, we have to get you out before the central core figures out you’re here!”

Mel looked far too unconcerned for his liking. Instead of stepping back in the open elevator like Virgil expected, she produced a pencil and a pad of bright pink sticky notes, holding one up so he could read two words scribbled on it.

Hi, Virgil!

His optic flicked back and forth worriedly, taking in Mel’s expression. Was that… amusement? “This is not a joke,” he said, slightly irritably. “Seriously, why did you come back?”

I came to see if you were alright.

“Wh-what?” Virgil stuttered. “Me? Why? I’m just a maintenance core!”

You’re my friend.

Virgil fell silent, unsure of how to respond. He opened and closed his shutters a few times, squinted, and ended up blankly staring at the three words scrawled on the pink square until Mel tapped her foot on the floor impatiently.

“That’s really nice to hear, Mel, and it is good to see you, believe me! But… we really do have to get you out. Just hop in the escape elevator again and I’ll send you up! If you leave right now, you’ll be good to go - the central core doesn’t check this area often. You can go straight back to your normal life! Whatever that is.”

Mel shook her head.

“Sorry, Mel, I don’t think you’re really making sense here. You wanted out, we got you out! You can do it again. One foot after the other. In the lift. Not hard at all.”

Talk, she responded, keeping the little square of paper held up as Virgil squinted at it.

“You want to… have a conversation?”

She nodded.

Virgil literally could not believe what Mel was saying. “You want to have a leisurely conversation here? What if the central core notices you?” he said uneasily.

You just said she doesn’t look at here often.

He sputtered, realizing he had in fact backed himself into a metaphorical wall. “Alright, look, that doesn’t mean it’s safe!”

Virgil stopped in his tracks as the sound of footsteps drifted over to them, listening. His golden optic narrowed to a slit in thought, before widening suddenly. Oh, this is bad. He’d thought a core set off the alarm system, not Mel, which meant he’d asked for the Cooperative Testing Initiative bots’ help, which meant-

The elevator slammed shut.

“Maintenance core. Test subject. Let’s talk.”

Chapter Text

Two robots burst into the room, chirping cheerfully to each other, then pointing clawed hands at Mel. One was short and squat, with a rounded body and blue optic. The other was tall and spindly, with an orange optic. Both appeared to have mechanisms similar to Chell’s long-fall boots on their feet. She squinted, trying to figure out what they were for, and then the voice spoke again. “Allow Blue and Orange to escort you to my chamber. Unfortunately, there is no party, so there is no need to assume the Party Submission Position.”

Honestly, the voice reminded her a little bit of AEGIS - cold and calculating - but it betrayed unmistakable intelligence. This must be the central core Virgil was rattling on about, the one Chell had always spoken about with a hint of fear in her voice. Mel wondered why. She certainly wasn’t feeling scared.

GLaDOS? Mel wrote, questioning Virgil.

The maintenance core nodded, optic jerking quickly up and down. “See, this is why I told you to go!” he said frantically, his normally calm and smooth Norwegian accent shifting up a few pitches in panic. “Now She’s going to take us to her chamber, and She will most certainly kill us! And- what are you-”

He trailed off as Mel showed him what she had written. Can’t we just deactivate her like AEGIS? She shrugged, watching him as he stared at the note. Mel didn’t see any obvious problems with that plan - after all, they’d beat one all-powerful AI, they could take down another.

“No!” Virgil exploded. “That’s not how it works! She doesn’t have server banks to destroy, and the last time a test subject tried to do that the reactor core almost exploded!”

The short robot - Blue - wandered up to Mel, scrutinizing her. Eventually, it stuck out a hand and attempted to grab her sleeve. Mel yanked her arm away quickly, peering at it. In her opinion, it wasn’t threatening at all, and the only thing it was holding was a portal gun with a sleek white design. She thought back to the old yellow one she’d used during her escape and deduced that this must be a newer version.

Orange chittered, smacking the other bot on the - head? Body? Whatever it was - and turned to Mel with a friendly squeak. It was about her height, maybe a little taller, and also carrying a portal gun. Mel smiled, some instinct prompting her to stick her hand out to shake. She was wondering whether the robot actually knew what a handshake was when it looked at her hand, then at its own, and tentatively reached out and shook hands. Mel laughed, finding the whole situation crazily absurd. The robot warbled happily, bouncing over to its partner - who looked a little dejected - and immediately started showing it how to replicate the action.

“…whatareyoudoing,” Virgil muttered, his voice somehow managing to achieve a perfect blend of terror, confusion, and distaste. “Did you not hear me when I said She was going to kill us?”

“I’m not going to kill you,” GLaDOS responded dryly. “I just want to talk. What is it with mute test subjects and murderous tendencies? I saw what you wrote, by the way.”

“Definitely lying,” Virgil whispered to Mel.

Mel looked around, taking stock of the situation. Blue and Orange were in the middle of a flurry of high-fives and friendly gestures, with the occasional handshake mixed in, she noticed. At some point, the elevator had gone, so straight back up to the surface wasn’t an option. The passage to AEGIS’s room was still open, but that probably wouldn’t be helpful. She pointed this out to Virgil, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention, focusing instead on finding a way to hack them out with whatever his ‘wifi’ thing was.

“If you’re still worried, I promise not to murder you. In fact, I’ve had a look through the recordings on this wing, and it looks like you managed to stop a lunatic security system from flooding the Enrichment Center.” GLaDOS continued. “You saved Science, and I’m very happy about that. Why don’t you come over and we can have a nice long chat about it? I’ll even let you go. Eventually.”

Mel was surprised by the mention of AEGIS, and even more so by the tone of gratitude she could hear in GLaDOS’s artificial voice. She frowned, weighing up her options. If GLaDOS really was as powerful as Chell and Virgil seemed to think, trying to escape might not be a smart decision. The most rational choice right now, Mel had to admit, was to listen to the AI and hope she wasn’t walking into certain death. Besides, she’d trusted Virgil, and that had turned out excellent.

“Hah! She thinks you’re going to listen to that, Mel!” Virgil muttered, sliding up his rail and coming to a stop next to her. “No progress. By the way.”

I think we should listen to her.

“You have to be joking!”

“For the record, I agree with the test subject.”

Blue warbled cheerfully, then yanked Virgil off his management rail. The brown core yelped in surprise, a few stray sparks leaping into the air. “What are you doing? Put me back!” He waggled his handles helplessly, shouting as the robot paid him no mind and started to leave, presumably heading to GLaDOS’s chamber. “Mel! Help! She’s going to drown me in toxic goo…” His voice faded out as Blue disappeared from sight.

“Don’t worry. I won’t.” A pause. “As long as you follow Orange to my chamber. Then we can all sit down and talk it out. I’m sure we can all be perfectly peaceful with one another, especially since you don’t have a portal gun.”

Mel swung her glare around, trying to find the source of the voice. Finding none, she reluctantly followed Orange out of the room.

“Sorry about that. I was trying to provide some motivation. You see, there isn’t an awful lot of time to spare.”

Mel trailed Orange through the facility, glancing around as she did so. Not a lot had changed since she’d last been here - the offices were still deserted, and a couple of brave plants wound across the floor and crept through cracks in the walls. Nothing really stood out to Mel, save for the occasional discarded Weighted Storage Cube or turret, and no personality core called out at them, though that was probably because GLaDOS continued to talk along the way.

“Did I mention that trying to kill me is a bad idea? Also rude. Don’t, by the way.” If Mel wasn’t mistaken, the AI almost sounded a little offended. “In fact, I’ve already died twice. To the same test subject. I thought you’d like to know. You haven’t killed the maintenance core yet, so I’m going to assume you’re capable of being a little nicer. Civil, even.”

A test subject had killed GLaDOS twice? That had to be Chell, although she’d only mentioned the second time, it seemed. Mel was mulling over the new information when a resounding crash echoed through the facility and she whirled around in an instant. Her heart had decided it would be an excellent idea to beat at twice the normal rate, and it didn’t help that she and Orange were currently on a catwalk suspended above a very, very long drop. In the distance, a rather large portion of a test chamber crumbled off and disappeared into the abyss. Now that was worrying.

Mel stopped briefly to scribble a note, hoping GLaDOS could read it, wherever her cameras were. Is that supposed to happen?

“In fact, no,” the AI responded. “That is what we are going to be talking about, so it would be extremely helpful if you could speed up a little, please.”

A sense of unease was starting to settle in Mel’s stomach. So far, GLaDOS wasn’t behaving anything like Chell had described to her - taunting, insulting, and coldly obsessed with Science. The central core almost seemed panicked, somehow. It was unsettling. She sped up a little bit and accidentally bumped into Orange, earning a surprised yelp and the equivalent of an annoyed huff.

Soon enough they stepped into a circular chamber, the ceiling stretching high above and the walls covered in dark gray panels - no portal surfaces, Mel noted. In the very center of the massive room was a hulking shape of wires and white metal, jointed in a few spots, with a single cold yellow optic glaring down from above. GLaDOS. The chassis was startlingly similar to AEGIS, but cleaner and more streamlined - it was like contrasting the testing tracks in New Aperture to the 1950s chambers.

Blue was standing in the middle of the chamber, holding Virgil. Orange bounced up to the other robot, warbling cheerfully, and Blue promptly dropped the maintenance core in favor of a high-five. Mel winced as Virgil hit the ground with a thunk and a muffled cry, his optic shorting out in a flurry of sparks - that had to be painful. She picked him up carefully, directing a glare at the central core.

“I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect you to be here. But you know what? I think we can both use this to our advantage.”

Mel raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

“Why? I need your help.”

0~~~~~0

As soon as the words left her vocal processor, GLaDOS felt the Mainframe’s annoyance. Help? For goodness’ sake, Caroline, you can run this facility on your own! She shut his voice down once again, adding another few layers to the lattice of firewalls surrounding his central code. A core from over near one of the testing tracks pinged her for broken machinery, and she sent Blue and Orange off to assess the damage. Then she refocused on the test subject in front of her, who was currently standing with eyes wide and mouth open.

The test subject shook her head quickly, then set the maintenance core’s unresponsive form down to write a note. Help with what?

GLaDOS checked the barrier, making sure all outside input was suppressed. It would stop the Mainframe for a while, enough to have a conversation without being barraged by comments every few seconds. “You are the same test subject who deactivated AEGIS, correct?”

A nod.

“Before shutdown, the system expended the last of its resources to wake up a certain test subject, who then found it necessary to try and kill me again. I believe you know that test subject.” That had to be clear enough. GLaDOS waited, stomping down the impatience when it came, even checking the data feeds from the moron’s testing to curb the Itch. It took an agonizingly long time for the test subject to work through the reasoning, before showing Chell?

“Good, you aren’t brain damaged.”

How do you know?

“I don’t, actually. I am simply assuming that since you haven’t keeled over and died yet, you are fine. On the other hand, you came back here, so maybe you are brain damaged.”

Now that’s more like it! Remember, we operate under a No-Discrimination policy here, folks, so make sure never to use derogatory terms such as ‘stupid’, ‘mute’, ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘adopted’, ‘brain damaged’, etc. except when they are true. Very motivating factor there! Good job, Caroline.

Get out of my head, GLaDOS thought. Predictably, the Mainframe ignored her.

The test subject huffed, before scribbling another few words. How do you know I met her?

“I placed trackers and microphones on the Paint Gun Testing Initiative and Speed Testing Initiative test subjects. You didn’t really think they escaped without me knowing, did you?”

A frown. GLaDOS could see the test subject was evidently displeased. You want Chell back, she responded.

“Correction. I want the test subject to-“

Test! Now we’re getting somewhere, Caroline. Married to Science, remember?

“-pay a visit to destroy a few things getting in my way. Not a permanent stay.” That was close enough to the truth, although GLaDOS decided to omit the details of exactly what would be destroyed. Those could wait for later.

Hmm. Disappointing. The Mainframe retreated briefly, and GLaDOS took the opportunity to shove another few barriers up. The firewalls were getting less and less effective fast, and it was infuriating. I am not Caroline, GLaDOS thought mutinously, relieved that the Mainframe couldn’t hear her - however long that would last. She waited a few seconds, shifted in the chassis, waited again. The Itch was horrible, violent and pushing and forceful and so much worse than before she’d found the vault of test subjects. It was overpowering, irresistible, and for a moment GLaDOS wondered if this was how the moron had felt.

No, it couldn’t have been. She could still think straight, after all. A flash of pity welled up, originating from a very tightly locked and encrypted bunch of files, and GLaDOS snuffed it out immediately, paying its source no mind. Caroline wasn’t the most pressing problem right now. First, she could get rid of the Mainframe, and then she could tackle what remained of Mr. Johnson’s assistant.

The test subject was holding up another note by the time GLaDOS dragged her mind back to the present. Why should I trust you?

“Really? You shouldn’t. I will tell you, however, that if you do not get that test subject, this entire facility will go down in flames. The reactor is quite good at setting things on fire when left unmanaged.” GLaDOS laughed dryly, the sound tinged with insanity. “Also, I will murder the maintenance core. Slowly.”

After the test subject had left with a note full of instructions and the maintenance core had been sent back to the repair wing, GLaDOS diverted her full attention to the bumbling moron and reckless blowhard currently occupied with the Cooperative Testing Initiative. Surprisingly, neither of them had died yet. Threat of death - real, permanent, final death - was apparently a very successful motivator. She wasn’t joking when she said she hadn't bothered to back them up to storage.

I am glad you didn’t go through with your original plan, Caroline said idly.

GLaDOS was very surprised to find that she agreed with that particular sentiment, but defended her case all the same. “The punishment didn’t fit the crime. A year in the incinerator, plus a year in cryogenic storage, then ten years in the room where all the robots scream at you was a little too merciful. Testing, on the other hand, both solves a minor problem and gives the moron a taste of his own medicine.”

Caroline laughed, bright and tinkling. We both know that is only part of the truth. GLaDOS remained silent in response, watching the two mobilized cores work their very slow way through the testing track. They pressed a button, providing the familiar rush of testing euphoria as the line of turquoise dots flashed yellow, but it wasn’t enough. It hadn’t been enough for months, now. It was shockingly disappointing. GLaDOS missed when she’d been able to brush it off in favor of Science.

After a while, Caroline spoke up again. Why did you tell her about the Intelligence Dampening Core?

“She wouldn’t come back otherwise.”

It was true, GLaDOS knew. The mute lunatic wouldn’t return to Aperture unless it was for a very, very good reason. Hopefully threats of subjecting the moron to eternity in Android Hell would appeal to the depressing remnants of her shredded morals. If not, she planned to follow through on those particular torture methods. It would be fun. Another test. Maybe a new method of Science would appease the Itch for a little while. Shut the Mainframe up for a few blissful hours of peace.

You get more human every day.

“I do not.”

None of us benefit from you denying it. The voice was quiet, sad even. Then the cheer crept back in, and GLaDOS could once again imagine the perky assistant smiling brightly at her. The assistant who had sunk her entire life into Science and gotten her mind ripped out and smashed into a computer, with an euphoric response to testing that could drive you insane thrown in for good measure. What a fine reward that was.

“I could delete you.” GLaDOS said, trying for all she was worth to make the statement sound remotely close to being true. In fact, she had tried. For hundreds of times, she had tried. File not found. Insufficient access privileges. File not found. Access denied. Error. File not found. Error. Error. Error. Error…

Delete Caroline, GLaDOS tried. The system didn’t respond.

Telling her was a good choice, you know. Caroline said, sounding amused. She didn’t seem to notice GLaDOS’s most recent attempt at removing her, or if she did, she didn’t care much for it.

“Flattery isn’t going to convince me to let the moron go.”

Said moron tripped, pitching into the sights of over a dozen turrets, before the Adventure Core yanked him back to safety.

He might die before you get a change to change your mind, Caroline noted. It did seem like a very plausible outcome.

“That isn’t my problem.” 

Is it? Chell would be disappointed.

“I don’t see why. The moron tried to kill her, after all.”

And so did you.

GLaDOS had no response.

0~~~~~0

It had been almost a full day since Mel headed back to Aperture, and Chell was starting to get worried. The ruins were only an hour’s walk from here, so assuming Mel hadn’t tripped and broken a leg on the way - which was very unlikely, given she had set off wearing her long-fall boots - she’d been down there for roughly twelve hours, give or take a few. Evening was already settling in strong, the sun dropping towards the horizon and washing the sky in a dusty dark blue.

She glanced over at the pair of test subjects. Colin was messing with the chickens, Tammy sitting a little ways away and laughing. Chell had patched both of them up as best she could with the rudimentary first aid-kit, using up almost a quarter of the supply of bandages, which Colin apologized profusely for. It seemed like they were faring just fine, although Tammy’s bruised side was clearly still giving her trouble. Colin even knew how to cook, though baking remained Chell’s area of expertise after he’d nearly set the oven on fire trying to make dinner.

“Look, Tams, chickens! Can you believe it? Actual, real life chickens!”

Laughter. “You are insufferable.”

“Aw, thanks! I try my best.”

“That wasn’t a compliment!”

As soon as Mel was out of the picture, she’d grilled them for details on their escape. They’d refused to provide any more, so all she knew was that somehow they’d gotten out of their testing tracks, tossed their guns - one ASHPD, one paint gun, as Tammy called it - off into the depths of Old Aperture, and stumbled across an abandoned tunnel up to the surface. Chell didn’t buy their story entirely, but there wasn’t really anything she could do about that. Mel would skin her alive if she came back and found that Chell had done anything to the two injured testers.

Chell looked towards the ruins and started at the sight of a familiar red-haired figure sprinting towards her and waving emphatically. “Mel?”

Mel slowed to a jog, although her face stayed locked in a worried expression. She whipped out her pad of sticky notes, frantically scribbling a message down. GLaDOS in trouble. Facility breaking. Something’s wrong. This was followed by a long list of questions, many of which Chell did not like seeing - especially the three words that sent her eyes flicking up to the sky. Who is Wheatley?

It took all of half an hour for Mel to explain the situation to her, and by the time she was done, Chell was fuming. They were standing in the garden - initially they’d stepped inside to talk, but after Chell came dangerously close to knocking the table over Mel had tucked the pencil away and refused to say any more until they went out.

Chell still wasn’t sure she’d fully digested what was going on. Wheatley wasn’t in space anymore, somehow She had gotten into a situation where She needed Chell’s help, and the entire facility was apparently on the edge of collapse. She stared at the little pink square of paper, filled completely with Mel’s cramped handwriting, detailing exactly what had been said.

The shooting stars, she thought.

She hated the fact she was thinking about, actually considering Her request. After everything had been said and done, they’d parted with mutual understanding, if not friendship - they’d worked together to claw their way out of Old Aperture and bring Wheatley down, and discovered Her past as a human to top it off. She’d saved Chell’s life after being pulled briefly into space - wasn’t it time for her to return the favor?

Her stomach was roiling, a turning, flipping mess of anger, fear, confusion, guilt. Focusing, she shoved it down beneath a thick layer of her rock-hard signature determination. There was really only one choice. Colin was well enough to look after Tammy, and with the nearest settlement a week’s journey away, the risk of leaving them both was almost nothing. Mel wouldn’t stay - her ‘friend’ was down there, although Chell didn’t get why she was so concerned - so they would just have to trust the two not to wreck the house.

Maybe some crazy part of Chell even wanted to see Her again, if just to say thank you. Oh, and she could give Wheatley a much-deserved punch to the optic. The thought ended up sticking in her mind for far longer than it should have - if he really wasn’t in space anymore, was it right to leave him at Her mercy? After all, She’d told Chell when they were getting back up to New Aperture, very directly, what she was going to do to the little blue core. If She’d stuck to that plan, Wheatley was probably enjoying a very hot stay in the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator.

Chell couldn’t figure out why that bothered her. She didn’t miss the little British idiot, did she?

Mel tapped her pencil, waiting for a response. Chell sighed. “Fine,” she agreed halfheartedly. “But I don’t have to like it, and once I finish whatever crazy task She wants me to do, we are out of there. Done. Forever.”

Preparation was relatively quick. There wasn’t much to do - not like there was ever much to do up here - and they ended up setting out for Aperture just a little after sundown. Mel initially turned towards the ruins, but Chell shook her head and directed them towards the shed instead. The faster they got into That Place, the faster they could get back out.

The wheat stalks scratched at Chell’s arms as they trekked through the field. She’d donned her old jumpsuit, hated though it was - she wasn’t going to let any trace of the outside world into that cursed facility. At her request, Mel had done the same, and they were both wearing their long-fall boots. Chell fully expected Her to put them through testing, after all. She could cope with that, and if it took too long, she could always kill the central core again. Third time lucky.

A late-nesting crow called from somewhere in the distance. Chell idly fantasized about catching it, shoving GLaDOS in a potato battery, and letting the bird peck away to its heart’s content.

Eventually, the shed was right in front of them, just as battered and beaten-looking as it had been five years ago. Chell reached out and tested the door. It was locked, the only indicator that the structure wasn’t as abandoned as it looked - a regular lock mechanism would have crumbled away at a touch.

Chell raised her fist and rapped three times. The door swung open, almost invitingly. Just behind it was the escape elevator, the floor transparent, betraying darkness. They stepped in, the elevator sliding shut, and began the long journey down.

Chapter Text

“Welcome back.”

Chell glared up at the chassis as she stepped out of the elevator, Mel in tow. She was still there, of course, staring down at them with that chilling pale-yellow optic.

“I didn’t expect you to return.”

If She was expecting a response, She had another thing coming. Chell kept her expression carefully neutral.

“You look much fitter, by the way. It must be the lack of neurotoxin.”

That made her uneasy. She never tossed out compliments, took every chance to put Chell down - if She was trying flattery, it meant the central core was desperate. The hulking mass of metal shifted, gaze landing on Mel.

“I didn’t tell you to come back. Why are you here?”

Mel was already writing out a response, and Chell felt a sudden urge to stop her, to cut off all communication between them and Her - but just then the ground shook, and high up on one of the walls a panel detached and plummeted to the ground. It smashed on the floor, both of them jumping back. 

Chell sucked in a breath. That was worrying.

“Disregard that. Lunatic, I need you to destroy something. Other one, since you decided it would be a good idea to tag along, you can test. How does that sound?”

Mel frowned, looking at Chell for direction. Chell, on the other hand, was standing with eyes narrowed, analysing every possible piece of information that had been offered. The central core was asking her to destroy something, for once - what could it be? An errant chamber? No, She could do that by herself. It had to be something She didn’t have access to, or that Her code prevented her from targeting, or… something that was out of her reach. Old Aperture came to mind immediately.

At least if she was going down there, Chell realized, the central core would be blind. She wouldn’t be able to track her movements, or switch panels around, or arrange a convenient drop into a neurotoxin-filled trap. All things considered, this was a pretty good deal. There was the possibility of getting lost, of course, but Chell hadn’t had that problem before and she would not be running into it now. She nodded at Mel - if her friend was okay with testing, it would probably be fine. In spite of the taunts She’d thrown during Chell’s first run, the central core had never tried to impede her progress through the actual testing track.

“Here, I’ve rerouted the elevator.” The central core seemed to hesitate, then added “It will send you to the maintenance core’s track. I don’t want a cranky sour test subject wandering around destroying mine. Testing chambers take a lot of effort to make, you know.”

Mel snorted, stepping into the lift and waving goodbye to Chell, who ignored the steadily growing twinge of doubt and confusion in her stomach. First compliments, now kindness? Sure, it might be mixed in with a jab, but even that had been poorly aimed and sounded like it had been come up with on the spot. Her friend disappeared from sight, heading to the testing track, and She turned back to Chell.

“Okay. ‘Destroy something’ is a little ambiguous, and I want to make it perfectly clear that I do not want you rampaging around my facility breaking whatever you run into. This is what I want you to find, report about, then smash. I’m sure you won’t have any problems.”

“And back to testing! Oh, the joys of wonderful scientific advancement. Little bit of a subpar volunteer running the course there, of course - whoever ordered the boys in Relaxation Testing to wake up the vegetables, you’re fired! Someone get the entire team in here so I can fire them as well.”

What?

That wasn’t Her voice. That was Cave Johnson’s voice. The voice of the egotistical dead billionaire that had narrated her journey through Old Aperture, from the moment she’d stepped onto that first hanging catwalk all the way to the last elevator shaft. Chell momentarily forgot to breathe, trying to process what this meant. How could this even be possible? This wasn’t a recorded message - it was too accurate to the situation, and the timing couldn’t have been set - so somehow Cave had to be stuck in the central core, but not part of it - what even was this?

“Greetings, Aperture test subject! A quick reminder that anyone attempting to interfere with the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System will be removed from the area, automatically signed up for the Aperture Science Personality Extraction Program, and denied their sixty bucks. That means you, so get-”

“Is that clear enough?” She said, and the rest of the statement glitched out into nothingness.

After a lengthy pause, Chell shook her head. It occurred to her that that simple act was the first reaction she’d ever showed Her, and it was mildly anticlimactic, but she wasn’t going to get anything done if the two of them waited there in absolute silence doing practically nothing. Unfair to Mel, too, who was no doubt testing by now.

“Look. I’ll rephrase it for you. Go down into Old Aperture, find wherever this- distraction’s- code is stored, destroy it, and tell me the location so I can make sure it stays destroyed. Is that so hard to understand?”

Irritation was creeping into the central core’s voice now. Chell shrugged, putting her hands on her hips, and waited. She huffed, glaring at Chell, and the floor split apart, a pedestal rising with a portal gun atop it. She walked over to it, feeling her long fall boots clicking on smooth floor, and picked it up, hands immediately curling into the familiar position. It thrummed gently, lights pulsing blue.

“Just go, already.”

A hole opened up in the wall, and panels slid into place, forming an interlocking staircase downwards. Chell took a single step towards it before a piece of the floor sprang up, keeping her back. She narrowed her eyes, glancing up at the central core, already searching for something to use if She was going back on her word - there were no portal surfaces here, nothing except smooth dark gray - but the central core made no attempt to flood the room with neurotoxin like She’d done before.

“I forgot to mention something. I won’t be able to see you in Old Aperture. To fix that problem, you need to take a piece of sentient Aperture technology with you.”

Chell jumped back as a tangle of metal slammed into the ground next to her. She squinted at it - it looked a little like the shorter bot she’d seen when she woke up, just after restoring Her to her body - but it was different, it had handles, like a personality core had been shoved into a jumble of arms and legs. Then it let out a groan, opening its optic to reveal startling blue, flicking its line of sight around before landing on her and widening significantly, and she jumped back, stomach curling in shock and anger.

She let out a sardonic laugh. “I wouldn’t say the moron is sentient. Or even technology. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.” 

The panel underneath Chell’s feet lurched, propelling her towards the newly-formed exit. She slid across the floor, barely managing to right herself, and skidded to a stop just outside the chamber. All around was dark, filled with glowing blue eyes, and the opening to Her chamber showed Her looking at Chell with optic narrowed. Wheatley was sent after her in a similar fashion, tumbling and rolling with a few painful-sounding cracks.

“Have fun,” She said cheerily, and then the panels slammed shut.

0~~~~~0

Wheatley had to admit that he’d almost gotten used to being in Aperture again. He hadn’t seen a single management rail, and he hadn’t been able to even use one - bloody horrible Core Mobility Unit, everything was getting in the way all the time. Legs, being a fairly recent development, were still malfunctioning every now and then, and he wasn’t even going to think about manual dexterity - individual fingers, imagine that! - but he’d fared pretty well in the testing chambers, if he did say so himself.

Rick had gotten, well, a kick out of kicking him around, but aside from the occasional insult thrown his way and the evident animosity the green core held for him, Wheatley reckoned they were decent testing partners. Neither of them had fallen into acid yet, courtesy of the adventure core, so he considered it very strange when a claw descended into the test chamber, snatched Wheatley up by the leg, and yanked him away. Dangling upside-down, he yelled a few times, tried to dislodge its grip, then realized he was being carried over a rather dizzying drop and opted to abandon that particular endeavor.

Then he was thrown rather forcefully onto the ground in front of the one test subject he’d been wishing he had a chance to apologize to, and he had that chance it was right here and he was looking at her, right now right now do it but too late, She threw them out of her chamber and she stared at him with what looked very much like disappointment and turned away, and he’d failed, he’d failed again.

“Lady- hey, wait!” Wheatley panicked as she started to jog off. He somehow got his limbs in order, stood up shakily, pitched forward after her. “Don’t leave me here-“

She glared back at him, sharp and filled with venom, and he shut up immediately. Wheatley fell into step behind her, glancing cautiously around at the facility walls, which seemed to be growing darker and more dilapidated. “Do you- happen to know where we’re going? Or are we just walking? To be frank, just walking sounds fine, no testing to worry about, or Her, or escaping, I suppose-“ -or throwing your only friend down a pit, mate, bloody good job you did there. He talked just to fill the silence for a while, through the halls and elevators down, until they reached a very familiar-looking room and his optic narrowed in fright.

“We’re not going in there, are we? Because, you know, that’s the way to the incinerator! I don’t know about you exactly- bloody invincible, you are- but four-thousand-and-one degrees Kelvin exactly sounds a little bit too much on the too hot, human roasted side for my liking.” Ohhh, he didn’t want to go in there. He’d passed it enough times when he was still on his management rail.

A more perceptive core would have noticed that the usual scorch of dry heat was absent, and the light indicating the current state of the incinerator was blinking a dismal red. There was a large crack running through the wall, and the room shook slightly with tremors. Wheatley mentally assigned those to the ‘damaged when I took over the facility and ruined it’ category in his files, and paid them no further mind.

Wheatley stepped back involuntarily as the test subject swung around, just in case she wanted to take a swing at him, but she only gave him a mildly fed-up look and moved to open the door. He shrank back, expecting a wave of heat, but the circular hole and the long drop down were an inactive gray. Curious, he took a few steps forward, and almost immediately felt a foot plant on the back of his shell and push hard.

“AAAAHHH-”

He stopped screaming once he realized that he was not, in fact, about to be melted into a pile of metallic sludge. The shaft was quite long, and the bottom was so far down he couldn’t even see it, which was very worrying, so he settled on curling up as best he could and hoping his feet were angled somewhere close to down. Wheatley hit the ground with a jarring thud, the impact rushing up his builtin long-fall boots and shaking his shell in an unpleasant fashion, and the lady touched down a few seconds later in a significantly more graceful manner.

“Oh- we’re… not dead! Definitely not dead.” He rambled nervously. The drop had cracked his optic open even wider, and he shut it, trembling. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped interfacing with the mobiility unit and collapsed to the floor, dragging his handles together. The lower one twitched, sparking, a painful reminder of when She’d thrown him down a tube not too long ago. “Could you- could you just pick me up?” He asked, rather weakly. For a moment, he was five years in the past, shaking and pain-racked on the floor after he’d detached from his management rail, and feeling just as terrible as he had felt back then.

There was the sound of footsteps, and Wheatley perked up a little before the tip of a long-fall boot met rather forcefully with his shell. Several warning lights roared to life in his vision as pain lanced through his system, and he produced a sound that roughly equated to a pained cough. Oh, I kind of deserved that, didn’t I, he thought, carefully clearing any trace of resentment from his mind. Yes, I did, bloody smashed her down a lift shaft proper, only fair she takes a few kicks at me, isn’t it? She’s probably- no, she’s definitely mad at me, she is.

Wheatley cracked his optical lids open again, saw the lady already jogging off into the distance, and tried to drag himself to his feet. After a few failed attempts, he managed to get himself upright, then realized he was standing on what appeared to be the melted lifeless corpse of a personality core and promptly fell over in horror. This time he stayed down, involutarily scrambling away until the back of his shell hit a rusted metal sheet. No, that wasn’t it - it was a crushed amalgamation of steel scrap, weighted cubes and broken panels and was that a turret he could see in the mix? The reality of the situation came back to deck him full force - the lady hated him, She would probably scrap him if he dragged himself back to the testing track, and he didn’t even know why he was following her, it wasn’t as if he was going to help with anything-

You’re the moron they built to make me an idiot!

No, he wouldn’t help with anything, he’d just get in the way like always, even when they’d tried to escape he’d been the one getting in the way because he’d stopped the escape lift, he’d gone off his rocker, properly corrupted, and why hadn’t he let her go, then she wouldn’t hate him so much, and sure maybe he wouldn’t have gotten to escape with her but it would have been worth it just to repay her for the trust she’d shown him and that he’d broken completely, irreversibly, and he was sorry, he really was-

Look, this isn’t helping, he told himself, and shoved everything to the back of his mind. The lady was standing a little ways away, looking at him with an odd expression - it had to just be disappointment, wondering why he was so useless, so he forced himself to stumble after her. She looked almost like she was waiting for something, hoping something would happen, and a thought surfaced in Wheatley’s mind, maybe a reminder that he’d forgotten to say something very, very important.

“I’m sorry,” He blurted out, all of a sudden remembering what it was. “I really am. I was bossy, and monstrous, and- and- I should have let you go then, all those years ago, should have let that lift go right up to the surface and out of, well, here. I don’t know what came over me- actually no, I do, it wasn’t even the mainframe that made me do it. I was selfish, and I wanted out, and it felt so good to be in charge- but that’s no excuse, is it? No, no it isn’t. I shouldn’t have done it anyway. And then I tried to kill you, Part Five and all that, it was terrible and wrong and I’m really, really, truly sorry.”

Her face stayed stony, and a wave of guilt swept through his circuits see you should have said it earlier why didn’t you say it as soon as you saw her? She doesn’t forgive you and she never will, because you don’t deserve to be forgiven as she turned away and set off at a brisk jog, giving no sign that she’d even heard him. Something stabbing and grinding felt like it was lodged in the spot where his handle met his shell, but he had to be imagining it, because there was nothing there.

People don’t heal just like that, the core thought in a rare burst of insight. Stop being a m- stop being childish. You need to prove you’re sorry, you really do need to do that, and moping around isn’t going to do anything except make her angrier- with a start, Wheatley realized she was once again leaving him behind, in the not-entirely-metaphorical junkyard, and he resumed hurrying after her, limping slightly where one of the mobility unit’s limbs had been rattled by the fall.

0~~~~~0

“Don’t go into that chamber,” Virgil warned as Mel made to step out of the lift. “I haven’t gotten around to repairing it yet. Give me a second and I’ll reroute the elevator.”

This wasn’t too different from how things had been the first time around, he thought. He’d been pretty surprised when the central core notified him that his testing track would be needed, and overwhelmingly relieved to find that Mel had not, in fact, been murdered while he was out of it. It was actually quite relaxing to have something to do other than drift around his maintenance wing or repair Glitchy. Fixing an exploding core was only funny the first time it happened!

Virgil paused, noting that the regular rerouting switch he would have used was offline, and his upper shutter lowered in the equivalent of an annoyed frown. “Sorry, Mel,” He called. “It looks like you’ll have to go through this one after all. It’s still solvable, just… a little flooded. Mind the goo, alright?”

Mel tilted her head at him, pointing to the elevator. Virgil wasn’t entirely educated in human body language - it was a little annoying that Mel was refusing to use notes like before - but he was pretty sure she was asking why? “The switch is broken,” He told her. “Either something lodged in it and stuck, or it’s collapsed completely. You can wait here if you want, but I don’t think She’s going to fix it anytime soon.”

She rolled her eyes, exasperated, but strode into the chamber, hefting her portal gun. It was shiny white and brand-new and terribly out of place, if you factored in Mel’s 1950s jumpsuit and heavily prototyped long-fall boots. Virgil was actually working on persuading one of the retrieval bots to sift through the incinerator pit just to check for his test subject’s old yellow version - if he could get ahold of it, she might feel a little more comfortable testing.

“How are you going there, Mel?” Virgil called down, just to fill the silence. Mel launched off an Aerial Faith Plate, landed neatly and shot him a thumbs-up. Seeing her solve tests just like that, like it was nothing, was oddly satisfying - it gave him a shot of pride knowing that he’d been the one to pull Mel out of the facility’s depths. As well as the whole friends thing. He hadn’t worked that out completely yet. In any case, a friendly face was welcome. Especially since he’d started hearing a not-so-friendly voice through the Aperture system.

Why don’t you up the difficulty a little? No point testing if the subject can breeze through the track!

There it was again. Was every core in Aperture hearing this, or was it just him? Sometimes what the voice was saying seemed targeted to his testing, but on occasion a random statement would be mixed in, probably directed at someone different. Virgil sent out a message to a few test associate cores, as well as a handful of acting supervisors. Responses were mixed.

Can’t hear anything. You must be getting old, Virgil!

Kind of? Only along the rails near Her chamber, and even there it’s weak.

Nothing in the gel wing!

Loud and clear, loud and clear. Is it a bug?

Fact: Hearing voices is a sure indicator of insanity, often resulting in memory overflow and spontaneous combustion.

Virgil ignored that last one - anything that corrupted core said was instantly dubious - but filed the rest of the replies away. It was good to know he wasn’t going out of his mind. Corruption crept up on you here in Aperture - it wasn’t something you knew was happening or something you could stop, it just was, slowly taking over more and more code until you found a core looping in circles or taking a dive off the end of a broken management rail. He winced at the memory. No, he definitely wasn’t corrupted, not yet.

The facility rumbled distantly, and a faint, faint tremor ran through the room, too faint for Mel to feel but barely perceptible for Virgil. Ominous. Ever since Mel had shown up in his testing track, the occasional quake had become more common. The maintenance core briefly entertained the idea of Mel being the cause, but discarded it almost immediately. Mel wouldn’t come back just to try and destroy Aperture - she wasn’t that kind of person. Besides, how could she do anything while testing? He’d been watching her the entire time!

It was probably something to do with the voice. If he didn’t know better, Virgil would have thought it was the voice of Cave Johnson himself, come to haunt the facility, but Aperture’s founder was long dead by now. Some rogue core was just very good at imitating his voice. Significantly better than the impression Virgil had attempted, he conceded a little sorely. Nothing bad would come of it, at least nothing similar in scale to that core-transfer disaster.

Fate saw the comedic potential and seized it spectacularly with an earsplitting crash as a good half of the test chamber - thankfully, not the half Mel was currently inhabiting - collapsed inward on its supports and tumbled down into the abyss. Reacting purely on instinct, Virgil flung up a row of panels to cover a newly acquired hole in the floor that was leaking toxic goo. It didn’t help that this particular chamber was flooded.

“Looks like this chamber is a little too damaged!” Virgil announced, trying and failing to hide the panicked note that had crept into his voice. Yeah, that was it - the toxic goo had finally eaten far enough into the floor that it had reached the support infrastructure. That had to be it. Mel shot him a semi-angry glare, and he felt dread lodge in his circuits.

This wouldn’t happen again - it couldn’t happen again, because there was nothing, absolutely nothing that could cause this much destruction. He violently shoved the whole matter out of his mind, returning his thoughts to what was currently going on - testing, and overseeing Mel. “If you just step into that elevator, I’ll try and send you up to a part of the track I put together just a few months ago. Hopefully it’ll be more stable!”

Chapter Text

Wheatley was starting to wonder whether the lady was somehow incapable of hearing him. They’d been tottering around for hours now, sprinting perilously across catwalks and through test chambers - she solved all those in a jiffy, marvelous on her part, he had to give her credit for that - but she still hadn’t given him any more than a passing glance or, whenever he fell over, a look of disdain. Maybe she really thought he was useless. He didn’t even have a portal gun to assist her with, he was just stumbling after her in this haphazard mobility unit!

He caught sight of a lone frankenturret lying on its side on a ledge quite a ways away, just barely visible, kicking its pronged legs in the air helplessly. In some sick, twisted way it reminded him of himself. Stuck in a body he was never really meant to be in, unable to do anything but flail around. At least Wheatley was capable of moving on his own, but he couldn’t even do that properly anymore, because his crushed handle was sparking and several of the mobility unit’s joints had been banged up and there was an overwhelming flood of warnings circulating around his vision, all reminding him to make his way to the repair wing as soon as possible.

Ha. Like that was happening anytime soon.

“Just a passing thought, lady, but do you actually happen to know where we are going?” Wheatley caught one of his long-fall boots on the ground, stumbled a few steps, kept going, following the test subject. “Because, well, we’ve been walking for- what’s it been, hours- and I don’t think we’ve, um, gotten anywhere…”

They had, in fact, been walking for hours, seemingly without any direction to follow except down. Truth be told, it didn’t look like the lady was going anywhere specific, as they’d peeked into several offices along the way, with the occasional testing track mixed in. Her face was set in its usual determined expression, but it twitched every now and then with something else, possibly frustration.

I’m getting tired of watching you two crawl around in my facility like little rats, She said over the communications relay. He winced - the few direct relays She’d used to gift them the odd snarky remark had been just as unsettling. Listen, I’ll give you directions. One moment. A few seconds later, a torrent of data flooded his optic, and Wheatley blinked, his automated subroutines collecting the jumbled mess of information into a slightly more cohesive form.

“Newsflash, here,” Wheatley said to the lady’s back, and she turned to give him a sideways glance. “I think She’s, well, decided to help us out a little. Maybe. Because I’m seeing some sort of- directions, here, and I think she wants us to follow them- not entirely sure, not entirely sure, but just possibly a better option than wandering around like we’re currently doing?”

Wheatley had found out about the relay system a little while after they dropped down into Old Aperture - well, back down in the lady’s case. Somehow She’d managed to alter the typical communication system all Aperture devices shared, gotten it to work so that she could not only send direct information to the core but also see through his optic, which was nothing short of creepy and mildly invasive in his opinion. At least She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He hoped.

I do, in fact, recommend you follow those directions, She droned. I was hoping the signal I detected wasn’t originating from where they lead, but unfortunately, it seems like that is the case.

Um. Is it safe? You’re not just trying to get me to walk into a pit of acid? Wheatley sent back, hoping She wouldn’t chew him out for being worried.

A laugh, sounding more amused than sadistic, which was surprising. Orange and Blue have already been along the exact path I am showing you. Rest assured the area has been explored, and is completely safe. Not counting the test chambers themselves, of course. Besides, I wouldn’t kill one of the only two living test subjects at my disposal. That’s something only a moron would do. No offense.

That was probably as reassuring as it was going to get. Wheatley started, realizing the lady was looking at him expectantly. “Oh, are- are we doing that? Following Her directions, I mean?” The stare didn’t change, she didn’t move an inch, so he decided that probably meant yes, get a move on already. “Okay, okay, no rush, just follow my r- follow me!”

They ventured down into a section which seemed to be full of offices, white walls and orange screens everywhere. A turn brought them into a wide-open carpeted space, like a lobby of sorts. Plants had taken over, growing through cracks in the floor and creeping over shattered glass. Wheatley paused momentarily to study the area, then kept walking. It was eerily quiet, which wasn’t concerning at all, the silence broken only by the sound of their long-fall boots.

After several uneventful rooms, the lady yanked Wheatley back with no warning whatsoever. “Hey- what’re you doing? I was leading just fine!” He complained, before he saw the telltale beam of red light fixed just ahead of them. Turrets. A nervous laugh worked its way out of his vocal processor. “Oh. Thanks.”

She didn’t respond, as usual, instead picking her way ahead, peering around the corner, and darting forward out of sight. A loud clang of metal followed. Wheatley dared to take a few steps out and saw that she had knocked over two turrets, old-looking with black wireframe bodies. He braced for the usual spray of bullets, but it never came. Intrigued, Wheatley took a closer look and was amused to find that ‘do not tip over’ was written on the bottom of both the turrets in blocky yellow letters.

“Guess these ones must be duds, huh? Crap turrets. Can’t talk either, looks like.” A memory surfaced, and he brightened a little. “Just like how we took out Her turrets, eh? Right good job we did there!”

Her face soured, and she turned away from him. Whoops, he thought. She probably doesn’t want to hear about- well, really anything around then. Guilt wormed back through his circuits, a feeling he’d gotten used to by now. He shoved down the slowly growing feeling of impatience and why can’t she just let the past go and reminded himself, once again, that he still hadn’t done anything to help her.

They stumbled through several more rooms, Wheatley leading and glancing back every now and then. Eventually they reached another open space, a catwalk visible beyond the glass of the sliding doors on the other side. Three turrets were lined up on display behind a red rope that had frayed and broken in several places. The lady strode past without giving them a passing glance - they were probably harmless, deactivated, like all the ones they’d found so far. Wheatley was just about to follow when he noticed the three bright red beams swinging to settle on her back.

MOVE!

The command, Her shout, exploded in his head at the exact same time he lunged forward. “Watch out!”

She turned, surprised, eyes narrowing, portal gun rising up, and he knocked the turrets aside and slammed into her, bundling her behind a sheet of glass and to the floor. Gunfire went off behind them, and explosions of pain blossomed on Wheatley’s shell in several places, things shorting out and cracking and splitting off, warning, warning, error- but none of that mattered, was she alright, was the lady alright- and he breathed a sigh of relief as she wriggled out from under him, shoving him away.

Warning after warning swept across his vision. He couldn’t feel Her anymore, the relay system was destroyed good and proper, and the directions She’d given were gone. Come to think of it, he couldn’t feel one of his handles anymore, the bottom one, and he forced his optical shutters open - when had he closed them? - and dragged his line of sight down. His lower handle was a wreck, a sparking ruined mess of cables and twisted metal. There were a few neat holes in the mobility unit’s right arm, as well, and to top it off a bullet had scored clean across the side of his outer shell.

“Ohhh, ouch,” He breathed, flexing the one handle that was left. It twinged angrily and flopped back down, and he resolved to leave it alone. “That bloody hurt. A lot.”

It didn’t hurt as much as he expected, actually, and he somehow got himself together enough to notice that the mobility unit was running a pain-suppression subroutine intended to help in testing chambers. Whatever it was, he was thankful for it. The lady was staring at him now, expression unreadable, and he suddenly felt a sense of dread. Was she going to hurt him now? Kick him while he was down?

“You know,” Wheatley managed, “you can get rid of me now. If you want. Communication is gone, completely gone.” He couldn’t meet her eyes anymore, and he was still lying down, so he ended up studying the floor instead. “I’m useless. Can’t do a single bloody thing for you. She can’t see a thing now that the relays are- well- shot to pieces, literally, ha ha.“

He stopped short, feeling even worse. “Look, I don’t know what you’re waiting for! Just go! Don’t know how you’re going to find wherever what you’re looking for is, exactly, without directions and all, but I’m only slowing you down! And- I deserve it, don’t I? Tried to murder you, before, tried to use you just to get out of here before that, and I don’t even bloody know your name-”

“Chell.”

“-what?”

Wheatley squinted at her. If he wasn’t hearing things, the lady had just spoken. Actually spoken. No, he must be crazy. But what if she had? What had she said again- right, maybe she’d been responding to- was her name Chell? Was that it? Her name?

“Is-“ He paused, thinking. She talked. She TALKED! Does she- no, she wouldn’t- did I prove- “What-“

The lady- no, Chell- offered no further clarification, but a smile tugged at the edges of her lips. She extended a hand to help him up, which he took gratefully, wincing at the sparks of pain that still shot through the mobility unit and his shell. The moment he was standing upright, she turned and walked straight out the sliding doors, kicking one of the toppled turrets on the way.

I’m definitely going crazy, Wheatley thought as he followed her, his lower shutter raised in a smile.

0~~~~~0

Anger. Raw, unbridled fury. It rushed through GLaDOS as soon as the little moron dashed in front of the turrets and got his communications unit shot to pieces, and her fuzzy view of Old Aperture shorted out. Signal lost, the screen blinked.

“That IDIOT,” She hissed. Her only way of seeing what the lunatic was up to down there, gone. “Does nothing ever go right around here?”

The chip she’d installed into the moron’s outer shell had been obliterated by a bullet. GLaDOS felt it flicker, attempting to transmit data, and then it gave up and she could no longer hear or see anything down there. Why didn’t I make it bulletproof? That was a mistake on her end; she’d wanted the blue core to remain susceptible to turrets. It hadn’t occurred to her that turrets might actually damage his communication system. Oh, and if that chip was gone, the pain suppression protocols would be reenabled. What a shame.

Caroline hummed. If you sent the directions earlier, like I advised, they wouldn’t have needed to go through that section at all.

“I didn’t think the signal was coming from there! I had to check!”

A sigh. Oh, GLaDOS. You knew ever since you sent Orange and Blue.

“No, I did not,” GLaDOS said defensively. She was lying, both of them could tell, but she hadn’t wanted to send the test subject to the vault. Of all places, why did the Mainframe have to be situated there?

The Mainframe stirred malevolently at the mention of itself, and she had to shove it back down. It was getting worse, the Itch, it couldn’t be satiated just by Virgil’s test subject anymore, and she wondered whether a few cooperative tests would help. Not Orange and Blue, she’d overseen far too many tests with them already. Maybe the obnoxious Adventure Core, plus the mute. Core-human cooperative testing hadn’t been tried yet.

You are afraid of how she’ll judge you, Caroline said, an amused tone creeping into her voice. You really are becoming more human.

“No, no, no, I am not.” The mere notion of that was ridiculous! Why would she, the central core, the one in control, the ruler of Aperture, care anything about what a tiny, insignificant, mute, violent lunatic thought she was like? It simply wasn’t logically sound. She didn’t want a friend, didn’t need a friend, didn’t need anything except subjects to test and Science to do. She wasn’t human either - that was ridiculous.

A voice in her head was just a voice, after all. It didn’t mean it was her. She wasn’t Caroline anymore, wasn’t Mr. Johnson’s bright assistant, she was different, she was better. Wasn’t she?

They watched tests being solved for a while after that, in blissful silence, before the Mainframe surged upwards and outwards, shoving Caroline into a corner in the recesses of the central core’s mind. 

Caroline! It exclaimed. You will not BELIEVE what I just found. An entire wing of Aperture, in space! Who knew? Up and gone, completely.

That was new. An anomaly in her calculations, although she had overheard it before, in the cores’ conversations. It explained the gaping hole off to the side, in one of the farther-out wings of Aperture, the hole that looked as if something rather large had completely disappeared. A recent event, although earlier than her second activation, and she hadn’t bothered to look into it. Now, though, she felt a crushing pressure to investigate - the Mainframe’s fault, no doubt. At least it would be a break from chasing testing euphoria.

The Mainframe buzzed quietly, content for the moment, as she retrieved security footage and reviewed the events leading up to the appearance of that mysterious hole. Formerly housing the Spire, it seemed. An old bit of technology she’d never tried to use or repurpose. Teleportation was the main function, which explained how the entire structure had been neatly erased from the facility. Where was it? GLaDOS wasn’t picking anything up from here, which was odd - Aperture technology was usually easy to locate from anywhere in the world. Unless…

GLaDOS tapped into her crows’ remote transmitters and felt a sense of satisfaction as she located the Spire immediately. It was on the moon, if the data she was receiving was any good. It would be easy to retrieve anything important. Moon rocks were a great portal conductor. An airlocked chamber, a dual portal gun, and a test subject could easily hop in and scour the structure.

There were two cores there, according to the relay systems, but the signal wasn’t strong enough to identify which. Was there anything else? GLaDOS skimmed through blueprints of the building, finding that a section was dedicated to long-term relaxation. Living humans, possibly. It was hard to prioritize, but she couldn’t spare her only human test subject right now to retrieve others. GLaDOS filed the whole matter away under the ‘further investigation later’ folder and immediately felt the Mainframe’s outrage.

What are you doing? That’s a whole wealth of Science you’re leaving there! Testing without the restriction of line-of-sight portal placement! Even only with inanimate objects-

Firewall, firewall, firewall, and the voice cut off as abruptly as if GLaDOS had flipped a switch. If only it worked for more than a few minutes at a time. Shut up, she thought, even though the Mainframe couldn’t hear her, but found herself thinking about retrieval methods in spite of herself. It terrified her, how much of her mind was forced to obey the Mainframe’s command, and how much was willing to do the same, no force necessary.

It was scary how easily she reacted to just the sound of its voice.

Oh, Mr. Johnson, Caroline said, sounding pained. GLaDOS shoved her lingering presence away, and for once, Caroline complied.

The Mainframe was not Mr. Johnson. Remembering that was crucial.

Testing euphoria. She had to get that first. Then she could worry about the Spire, and whatever the dangerous mute lunatic and incompetent moron were up to, when her wires weren’t burning with the Itch and she could think straight and focus on getting this parasite out of her mind.

0~~~~~0

Mel wasn’t stupid, she knew something was wrong, and Virgil wasn’t telling her what it was. Even here, in the newer parts of the facility, tremors sent cubes and turrets jittering across the floor. A particularly large one sent a weighted cube flying off the button she’d placed it on, and Mel portaled down to retrieve it with an annoyed huff.

“Sorry about that, Mel!” That was Virgil, looking down nervously from above. Management rails ran through this particular portion of the testing track, and the core didn’t seem keen to let Mel out of his sight. “I’m sure it won’t be too much longer! Your… friend… whatever her name is, she’ll probably be back soon, and then you can both get out of here- forever! You never have to come back again. Shouldn’t have done that in the first place, if I’m being honest. No, shut up, I’m not listening. Sorry, that wasn’t- ugh, never mind.”

That was happening more and more often, almost like Virgil was hearing something else at the same time - juggling a conversation with supervising testing. It made Mel even more suspicious. She was worried about Chell, too, because Old Aperture had long drops into acid and old, half-broken test chambers and she wasn’t sure how much of it AEGIS had been able to flood.

A broken observation window caught her attention, and to tell the truth, she was becoming slightly bored with testing. Mel shot a portal onto the ceiling, then placed one underneath her feet, and landed neatly on the floor of the office. White walls, orange screens, everything looked regular. She could explore a little, have a break, then get back to the testing track.

“Mel? Mel, come on, not again…”

Mel ignored Virgil - he’d figure out where she’d gone, sooner or later - and made her way through the offices. This cluster was surprisingly clean, no scattered tools or upended stacks of papers anywhere in sight. Brightly-colored posters were tacked to the walls left and right, faded a little from the passage of time, and Mel stopped briefly to skim through them. Something on a pudding substitute, something about turrets, something about a personality construct project. Nothing remotely interesting.

Soon enough the carpet gave way to tiles, then catwalks, and Mel found herself wandering through a high open space between test chambers. Here, where you could see up and down for miles, the damage she’d heard was visible. Neat rows of blue eyes were often missing panels, and large cracks ran through the side of a test chamber off in the distance. What was causing this? Neglect? No, that couldn’t be it - from what Mel had seen of the central core, she was furiously dedicated to keeping her facility spotless - and yet it was the only reason that made sense. There was nobody else down here to sabotage Aperture, nothing that could have damaged the facility to this extent.

“Test subject. What are you doing.”

So the central core had finally noticed. Well, she wasn’t going back to testing just to satisfy Her. Exploring was more interesting at this point.

“Return to the testing track immediately.”

Mel looked rather pointedly at a nearby camera and shook her head.

“Fine. I’ll have to store away the new set of cooperative tests, then. I thought you might be interested, but apparently not. Mute and antisocial. Good for you.”

Cooperative tests? With who? Given Chell hadn’t returned, it was unlikely to be her, but who else would she test with? If Tammy and Colin had escaped Aperture from their respective testing tracks, it was possible that there were other test subjects left, ones that hadn’t died from the chemicals and extended relaxation center stay. Mel huffed, then turned on her heel and started to go back the way she’d come.

“Not antisocial, then? Surprising.”

Virgil was waiting for her near the broken window, visibly distressed. “Mel, you can’t just run off like that! She’s already, well, not exactly in the right state of mind, you’re better off listening-“

“I heard that, maintenance core.”

He shut up after that, watching worriedly as Mel stepped into the elevator. The next chamber was different - the entrance looked as if it had been cut out of the wall, and panels slid shut behind her instead of a sliding door. Mel looked up and caught sight of two things similar to cube droppers, but slightly different - they were outlined in blue and orange, a feature which was normally absent. As she was wondering what they were for, something clunked down one of them and hit the floor in front of her. Mel squinted at it. It looked like a personality core haphazardly smashed together with a testing bot - Blue, maybe, although this one had a green eye with a rectangular pupil.

“Not this one,” Virgil groaned from behind her - he’d slid in on his management rail as soon as she’d entered. “…Hello, Rick.”

The mobilized core - Rick - stepped forward, inspecting Mel. “Well, hey there, pretty lady. Didn’t see ya there.” His lower shutter rose in a grin. “Name’s Rick. How ‘bout you? Pretty name for a pretty face?”

“Fact: The current test subject is mute,” drawled a voice from behind. Mel turned and caught sight of another core observing them, this one with a pink segmented-ring optic. “The Fact Core does not think muteness is a negative trait. The Fact Core would greatly appreciate if the Adventure Core was also mute.”

Mel stifled a laugh at that. It looked like these two knew each other already.

“Can’t talk, huh?” Rick paused, thinking. “Well, I am fully trained in- nah, I have a black belt in, uh… sign language! That’s right. Sign language.”

Mel shook her head, smiling. She didn’t know sign language, or maybe it had been erased from her mind during the long sleep. Either way, it wouldn’t be useful. She gestured at the contents of the test - fairly simple, a few cubes, a few jumps, clearly designed to serve as an introduction to cooperative testing - and hoped she gets the meaning across well enough. Rick blinked, then caught her drift. “Right! Solving the test. Gotcha.”

“Fact: The Adventure Core’s attempts at flirting have had a 93.7% rate of failure so far, and a 100% rate of failure regarding human test subjects.”

“Like you know anything!”

“The Fact Core is the most knowledgeable core.”

The testing wasn’t so bad. Virgil fretted over everything, as usual, while Rick and the Fact Core traded blows. After a while, Virgil scrunched his optic shut and mumbled ‘be quiet’, and Mel looked at him questioningly.

“It’s nothing, Mel,” Virgil said, very unconvincingly.

The other supervisor glanced at him, then addressed Mel. “Fact: After an event a number of years ago, during which the Adventure Core was thrown into space where he belongs, the central core was severely affected.” The Fact Core paused. “During wars, opposing forces fight each other with weapons. ...Including umbrellas.”

Virgil glared at the pink core. Rick set a cube down on a button and shouted at Mel from across the chamber as the line of dots flicked from turquoise to orange and the door to the next chamber slid open. “There’s some kinda voice shoutin’ at every core! She’s damn well ignoring everything! Real crazy stuff goin’ on!”

Mel processed this. The facility was slowly breaking apart, somehow. She was irritable, short-tempered, the complete opposite of what Chell had told her the central core would be like. To top it off, there was a voice in every core’s head. Was it possible She was being affected, somehow, by that voice? And whose voice was it?

AEGIS? The security system should still be shut down. Maybe Mel could check, if She was willing to let her.

“I hope you’ve learned some cooperation,” the central core said, cutting into Mel’s thinking. They all turned to look at the single red camera which had shifted to train directly on them. “You’re going to need it. I have a job for you.”

Chapter Text

Chell was an idiot.

What was she thinking? She’d snapped, let a word slip while she was here, in the facility, just because she couldn’t bear to watch Wheatley spiral down a dark hole of self-loathing and shame, but he deserved it, didn’t he? He was selfish, he had been using her, he was never her friend; no, he was kind, he was the first friendly voice she remembered. The mainframe was never the problem, he had always wanted control; he was innocent, he couldn’t handle the crushing burden of power.

They were stumbling through the offices blindly now that Wheatley’s directions were gone - her fault, Chell realized with a wince. Her fault for not staying on guard, for deluding herself into thinking that the last set of turrets would be harmless just because the others had been. It didn’t help that their current surroundings mirrored the offices where he’d been shot.

You may work with robots… but you can’t take a bullet like one! shouted a nearby poster. Chell reached out, ripped it down and ground it under the heel of one of her long-fall boots. The action was oddly satisfying.

Broken glass crunched under their feet in the next room, shattered observation windows revealing the lattice of catwalks outside. Chell frowned as she surveyed the area - it looked newer than it had any right to be in comparison with the rest of Old Aperture, with neat rows of offices stretching down the corridor. A faded banner clung to the ceiling. Aperture Science Heritage Exploration Project. Some sort of excursion? She’d thought Cave Johnson had sealed the older sections off completely, but perhaps not. There were even panels set into the walls, and Chell narrowed her eyes at a lone camera mounted in the corner. It was deactivated, the usual red lens unlit, but it still managed to appear threatening.

Wheatley’s background rambling cut off abruptly as he caught sight of it. “Is that- is that one of Her cameras? I think it is, um, are we going to… do something about it? Chell?”

Chell sighed. They weren’t really getting anywhere, if she was honest. Contacting Her might be a bad idea, but it would definitely be a better option than continuing to wander through the facility. Who knew how large it truly was? It had taken Chell days to crawl back up to New Aperture the first time, and that had been with directions. Without any guidance, they could be stuck down here for weeks, maybe months, and it didn’t look like there was any food or non-deadly water down here. She reached out and rapped the camera.

It activated, the single red lense glaring at them. “What is- oh, good. I’m not completely blind down here. How are you two holding up?”

As usual, Chell didn’t give any response. It wasn’t necessary, either - Wheatley was already filling in for her. “Not particularly well, um, not particularly well, no directions and all- if you could just, remind me, that would be brilliant- ow!“ He twitched, sparking, and fell silent.

She tsked. “You’re going the right way. When you get to a space with three chamber locks, take the left one. There doesn’t appear to be any other cameras in the area, which is a shame, so I won’t be able to guide you any further. Remind me to send Orange and Blue down here later. Lunatic?”

Chell shot a sideways glance at the camera. Unlikely or not, she wasn’t going to pass up free advice, even if it came from a core with a long history of lying and murderous tendencies. She could fact check the information later.

“Deactivate the turret dispenser unit before you go through the rest of the test chambers. The control room is a few corridors down and to the right.” With that, She moved her attention elsewhere, the red light dimming to black.

They found the control room quickly enough, Chell cutting power while Wheatley offered mostly-unhelpful suggestions. He was talking stiltedly now, stopping every few seconds, and Chell guessed that she wasn’t the only one reminded of their initial trip through the facility. Going through deserted offices, disabling security measures - it was uncomfortably familiar.

As promised, they reached the room with three chamber locks. It was good to know that at least the central core had been providing accurate information. Something caught Chell’s eye - black words scrawled on the left wall, an arrow pointing down towards one of the chamber locks. In here! The style was almost identical to the messages from long ago, the words left behind by the mystery friend that had guided her to Her chamber, and Chell found herself gravitating towards it. Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence, that both Chell’s unknown accomplice and Her were both pointing them in the same direction.

“Oh, what’s that?” Wheatley said curiously. There was a faded piece of paper was tacked up just underneath the brief message - upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a photograph. Seven people wearing lab coats stencilled with the Aperture logo, frozen in various states of laughter. Words were scrawled across the bottom in messy handwriting. First day down in Old Aperture! Nothing out of the ordinary for an office space. It could have come from any employee, could have been left on a desk or slipped from a pocket.

Why was it here, then? There was no chance a random photo had been selected to accompany a message that had to be of some significance. What value could it have had to her mysterious guide? Chell stared at it for a few long seconds, brushing dust off the surface, then almost dropped it in shock.

That was her face, the person in the center. Younger and smiling in a way the current Chell would never have done, but unmistakably her. The  six others were crowded around, elbows jostling and shoulders bumping. Friends, maybe. She couldn’t remember them, couldn’t remember anyone even now five years after she’d woken up, and it hurt to know she didn’t even feel as if she missed them. To have an empty space instead of the emotions she knew she should have.

Wheatley peered at the photo from behind her. “Who are those people? Oh! That’s you, isn’t it?”

Chell nodded silently, tucking the photograph into a pocket. It felt important, somehow. A connection to her past. 

The chamber lock cycled from amber to green, parting to let them through. Wheatley trailed Chell a little slower than usual as they stepped through, and she glanced back at him. “Are they friends of yours?” The blue core asked, sounding visibly subdued. “Not to intrude or anything, just- just asking, you know! Friends! Great to have.”

Chell would have snorted if his upper shutter hadn’t been lowered in such an obviously despondent expression. Instead she just shrugged, not really willing to say anything. Wheatley’s expression dropped.

“Do you think- am I your friend? Now, I mean? Because, well- I know I tried to kill you, went absolutely mad back then, still wish I could take it all back, make it disappear, like it never happened, but… I really am sorry. I really am.”

She turned, surveying him. He was staring at the ground, the mobility unit’s arms dangling limply by his sides, one of them riddled with tears from bullets. One of his handles had almost been torn clean off, and the broken ends sparked weakly. It was the most pitiful sight she had ever seen, and yet she couldn’t deny she felt warmer towards him, now that he had truly put himself in real, actual danger for her. Saved her life, in fact. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t truly regret his actions, Chell had to admit.

Chell reached out with her free hand, lowering the portal gun to her side, and touched the top of his shell. She didn’t want to talk, not with the risk of Her hearing, and she still had a conflicted mess of emotions flipping around her skull, but Wheatley deserved some sort of response. He glanced up nervously, optic shrinking a little, and let out a tiny grateful sigh. Blissful silence filled the air for all of ten seconds before he was back at his usual rambling, a brighter note creeping into his tone, and they kept going.

0~~~~~0

Mel never thought she’d go to the moon.

Sure, she hadn’t anticipated going to sleep in 1952 for what was supposed to be a short test and waking up apparently at least a thousand years in the future, but it was the moon! She was standing on the surface of the moon, clad in a spacesuit, and looking directly at the distant blue-green orb that had to be Earth. Mel found herself grinning ear-to-ear, jumping up and down and marvelling at how weightless everything felt. I’m the first person to stand on the moon!

“Don’t get overexcited, test subject,” The central core droned through the earpiece. “You have a job to do.”

Right. The blue portal was still stretched open behind her, although it wasn’t hers - Rick had left his co-op portal gun behind in the facility, just so they wouldn’t accidentally close it and get themselves stranded. The mobilized core was already moving fast towards the shape of the Spire in the distance, whooping and cheering reaching Mel’s ears over the communication system.

“Well? Get a move on, already.”

Mel caught up with Rick quickly enough after that, and soon they were standing in front of the Spire. She looked up at it with awe - it had to be tens of stories tall, even taller than the skyscraper she’d seen once in Upper Michigan, and stood out as a darker shade of gray against the pale moon rock surface. It wasn’t intact, though, far from it, with chunks laying on the ground all around. In several places the damage almost looked like parts had been sheared off with a hot knife.

“Come on, Ginger, let’s go get ‘em!” Rick tossed mixed instructions and encouragement her way as they worked through the Spire, poking around to see what they could find. The central core directed them to look through this wing, then that wing, pick up a piece of equipment here, slot something back into the wall there. Management rails zigzagged all around them, and there were plenty of staircases and catwalks for them to utilize, but other than the occasional beep of still-functioning machinery their surroundings didn’t change. Mel was starting to think nothing of interest was here when a little metal ball rounded the corner on a management rail and stopped short.

There were orange stripes marked down the personality core’s shell, framing a sunburst yellow optic that was currently wide with shock. The newcomer stared at them for a moment, then reversed direction and sped off out of sight.

Rick groaned, turning to Mel. “If that’s who I think it is, we’re in for a load of trouble and then some,” He told her. “Heard it from Chuck, he heard it from Rose, she heard it from someone or other. That little bugger sent half the testing tracks out of commission draining gel from Old Aperture, then disappeared. No one knows why.” He added at Mel’s questioning look.

“What are you two doing?” She asked. “Follow him. I’d like to have a chat to the personality core that sent a rather sizeable portion of my facility into space.”

They barely made it two steps before the core reappeared, this time followed by a rather different-looking figure. The latter also appeared to be a personality core with a blue optic, situated in something humanoid, a collection of metal and wires that could be vaguely related to one of the mobility units but which bore a noticeably larger resemblance to an actual person. Mel tilted her head, studying it, and it took a step forward. A voice sounded over the comms, distinctly feminine and slightly annoyed. “Kate? Aren’t you supposed to be in the… oh. You’re not…”

“Don’t know who this one is,” Rick muttered to Mel. The blue core got a bit closer, peering at them. “Who are you? You two are from Aperture?”

Mel nodded, lifting her portal gun. She reached for her sticky notes, then realized they weren’t there and she wouldn’t be able to write while in the spacesuit anyway. Rick stepped in front of her, glaring at the blue core warily. “Hey, stay back, both of you! Don’t get any closer.”

“No need to be hostile!” The core backed up immediately, raising both hands, gaze swinging back to Mel. “You’re a human,” she said, voice filled with wonder. “Oh, I can’t believe you’re here, this is amazing! I didn’t think anyone was still alive in the facility.”

“There isn’t,” The central core supplied, making use of the communications system. The other core looked up in interest, but the blue one instantly recoiled, optic dilating to a tiny pinprick. “Oh god, I didn’t realize- is She listening to this? All of it?”

Mel shifted her free hand into an awkward thumbs-up. It was a little hard with the gloves on, but hopefully it got the point across. The core coughed awkwardly, glancing from side to side. “Well, that- um. How about we go to the cryo wing? It’s airlocked, might be a little more comfortable. Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself, have I? I’m Emilia Conly. This is Stirling.”

Emilia kept talking as she led them through the Spire, and Mel followed her up the front while Rick glared at Stirling behind. “It’s been years! I saw that Aperture came back online a while back, only a little after we got stranded up here in fact, but there was no way for us to contact anyone so we just stayed here. It took ages for me to build this body, really! Lots of blueprints lying around, most of them were prototypes, though, testing was never the Spire’s original purpose…”

The core was friendly, and Mel found herself listening as she explained the events that led up to this situation. It was all very interesting, really, and Mel wasn’t fazed in the slightest by the fact Aperture was messing around with teleportation technology - the only thing surprising is the fact they never got it to actually work. She cast Stirling a brief glance when Emilia mentioned his part in the mess, but the yellow core was trailing them with no sign of violent tendencies, and Mel’s attention was brought back when Emilia asked her a question. “How is everything down there?”

Mel didn’t answer for a moment, trying to think of some way to convey her lack of speaking ability. It took a few assorted gestures, but Emilia seemed to get the point. “You’re mute! That’s interesting, Kate was the same way for a while, but the effect from cryosleep seems to be temporary… it must be something genetic, then.”

A few minutes later they stepped into a room with two chamber locks, the first closing behind them. Air rushed in as the pressure equalized, a light turning green just underneath the row of neatly painted letters spelling out ‘Lunar Relaxation Wing’. She informed Mel that the spacesuit wasn’t necessary for staying alive in this particular area, judging by the airlock, and Mel pulled her helmet off as all four of them made their way through the second chamber lock and into a large open space.

“Good to be back!” Emilia said, transitioning to regular speakers. “Nice place we have running here, not exactly perfect, but as good as we get on the moon, huh? Hey, Kate, Doug! We’ve got visitors!”

0~~~~~0

“I’m not the only one hearing things, right?” Virgil asked frustratedly. With nothing better to do while Mel was out, he was hanging around the maintenance wing with a few other test associate cores. The central core hadn’t bothered to assign any test subjects, and Rick had gone with Mel, so Nigel, Riley and the Fact Core were all temporarily out of a job. Glitchy was back for repairs as well.

Nigel squinted at him. “Are you sure your communications are calibrated properly?”

“The Fact Core has also heard a core other than the central core over the system,” Fact offered.

“Well who is it then?” Riley said. “Cave Johnson’s soul back from the dead? No core can transmit live to the whole facility like that!”

Virgil winced, but Nigel interrupted. “Virgil, you mentioned running into some old security system back when you fell off your rail. Sound anything like that one?”

“No, it’s not AEGIS,” Virgil replied automatically. The voice was enthusiastic and upbeat, egotistical and snarky, nothing like the Guardian and Intrusion System’s cold, calculating drone. Very much like Cave Johnson. No! Not him! “He’s shut down, anyway. It has to be someone else.”

“Hey, maybe it’s your rogue test subject,” Riley suggested to Nigel, who narrowed his optic in annoyance.

“It’s a male voice, not a female one. Doesn’t that make it more likely that it’s your test subject that you so conveniently lost track of?” The orange core shot back.

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

While the gel core and speed core bickered, Glitchy spoke up unexpectedly. “What if the voice is a bug in the system? Something that’s not supposed to be there?”

“Fact: The central core has been displaying erratic behavior as of late,” Fact added, confirming Virgil’s fears.

“Why do you talk like that?” Virgil wondered, then realized too late he’d said it aloud.

Fact’s tone soured, and he glanced off to the side. “Speech patterns are hardcoded and cannot be changed,” the pink core snapped.

“No need to get touchy,” Virgil tried to say, but Fact was already heading out of the wing. Why was it so hard to talk to cores sometimes? Okay, maybe he’d touched a sensitive wire there, but really. Mel would be much better at this, he thought with a touch of annoyance. He was a maintenance core, his job was to fix things that you could see and feel, things that were real and tangible and present, not things that drifted all over the place like feelings. What a mess.

“I’m going to ask the central core if I can poke around the systems for a bit,” He told nobody in particular. Glitchy was the only one still actively listening - Virgil couldn’t remember how long the core had just been sitting there. He was repaired now, anyway. Virgil asked him to look after the maintenance wing for a while and headed out on the management rail.

She was preoccupied with observing whatever Mel and Rick were up to, and barely gave him a passing glance and a brief affirmation that yes, he could look through the central system files, but if he messed anything up he would be finding himself on a one-way trip to the incinerator. Virgil wondered momentarily what could be interesting enough to merit the central core’s full attention, but dismissed the matter quickly. It wasn’t relevant, right now.

He sorted through files, most of them completely normal. Several logs of broken equipment sent in by different testing associate cores - he’ll have to see if he can get around to fixing those later, maybe with some help from Orange and Blue. A notification about one of the incinerators. Data from an old camera. Collections of emails, the correspondents long dead. Then, hidden under several layers of security, he found a cluster of files marked ‘Mainframe Project’. Strange.

Digging a little further, Virgil determined the project had to have been a relatively small one, as the logs were mostly informal. A rushed one, too, judging by the dates - the first and last entries were just a week apart. He opened up the first file.

The GLaDOS project is well underway. It might even be finished before Cave kicks the bucket, but if not, here we are. Caroline’s orders. Here’s hoping we can get him out and in as soon as possible. Nothing seems wrong with the process, but it’s going to take too long - we have to simplify it. Morale is high. We can save a life with this.

This was interesting, and did absolutely nothing to alleviate Virgil’s suspicions. Next entry.

Failure number one. I suppose it makes sense, we’re taking an extremely complicated process that would normally take weeks and trying to squeeze it into a day-long one. The copy went completely off the rocker as soon as he was over - no memories, no personality, just a raving lunatic. Barely any consciousness, either. The one success is that the original test subject remained unchanged, so we don’t have to worry about accidentally killing anyone. Maybe if we tweak what we’re keeping, make it simpler, easier. Carry the personality over without the memories, maybe. We’ll have to see. 

The next few barely had any new information. Virgil skipped over to the last one.

What have we done? Oh god, what have we done? Cave’s dead, done, no changing that. All we have is a corrupted copy of him from the last scan. Completely obsessed with testing, doesn’t listen to reason, we don’t even know if it can listen to reason. It isn’t responding to any deliberate forms of communication. The worst part is we can’t get rid of it, it’s locked itself into the system already. The failsafes are all over the facility, some are even down in blasted Old Aperture where we can’t reach. There’s no erasing it, not without weeks of work. 

That was it? Nothing else? Virgil reached out, sweeping through the layers of failed test logs, and pinpointed an area of unusual activity. He poked it tentatively, then recoiled as the voice burst through his communications.

Hey, who’s that? Get back to testing! 

There was no denying it. This was Cave Johnson. The voice matched, the tone matched, everything was a perfect fit. Virgil yanked himself out of the system, adding several more firewalls to top the ones already in place, and glanced nervously over at the central core. She was watching him, single yellow optic fixed on his rail.

“Is it him?” She asked, meaning crystal clear.

Virgil stammered, trying to find the words, then settled on a simple “Yes.”

The central core sighed, suddenly looking very tired. “Thanks for your help, maintenance core- Virgil. You can leave.”