Chapter Text
On the surface of the world, it was a beautiful day in Michigan.
The late afternoon sky was cloudless, boundless and blue, boasting a promise of a coming hot summer, the kind that had, once upon a less troublesome time, made humanity think nonstop of things like barbeques on the lakeshore, mid-afternoon swims, freeze pops and family.
The great stalks of wheat that sprouted out of the caustic soil of the wheatfield formed a borderless golden bronze haze, one extending in every direction to meet the blue sky like a yellow surfaced ocean, rippling with the refreshment of a steady Great Lakes breeze.
You could almost forget all your worries, in such a place as this. All your cares. So beautiful and quiet was the atmosphere—too quiet, almost, within this slice of paradise. It was so quiet that, had you spent any significant amount of time inside the wheatfield, you might have eventually become suspicious of just how quiet it was.
Where were the birds? The crickets? The field mice that you should have found scurrying around between the stalks? The spiders, and the flies, the squirrels, and the rabbits?
There were none to be seen or heard.
And it wasn’t just the silence, either, that made it strange, almost eerie. It was that it was sterile. It was sterile in a way which made you wonder how anything at all survived there. And the silence, in turn, made you feel watched. How did the wheat itself thrive so well in the toxic soil overlaid on top of miles of hidden, deadly Science facility, when clearly nothing else living was brave enough to trespass on top of it?
The answer to the question of why nothing wanted to be there should have been obvious—to all of us, at least, who had heard of such a formidable place before. We knew to keep out. For several hundred feet below this picturesque field of flowing molten gold wilderness, a jewel of Michigan, if you will, laid the long-abandoned maze of hallways and catwalks, bottomless pits and test chambers, and infamous, forsaken but once-bustling mines—that everyone had all once known as the legendary Aperture Science Laboratories.
A sudden, cataclysmic earthquake rent the silence of the wheatfield, transforming the normal pitching and rolling surface of it into chaos. The ground shook with a terrifying ROAR from beneath that would have been enough to send any present farmers running for cover.
EARTHQUAKE! It’s an earthquake, Bob, run!
Nonsense, Billy Mae, this is Michigan! We don’t get earthquakes in Michigan! I’m staying put!
To hell you are! What the bloody SAM HELL is going on!
Just kidding. Humanity was dead, or gone, or something of that nature, now that Combine meant something else besides just the subject of the song She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy. And so, in present times, there was only one actual, living breathing human soul left around to feel the earthquake in Aperture. And she was going to take Billy Mae’s advice, even if it killed her, and get out—because she (her name being one Chell Redacted), had felt it in a much more intimate way than one would have, having merely witnessed it from the surface.
She had felt it at its source.
For poor Chell, the legendary escapee of all time, had had the ungodly misfortune of getting to bear witness the impending final destruction of the Laboratories firsthand. And worse—it was her job to make sure they didn’t blow up with her still inside.
An announcement of imminent disaster rang through the endless, fire-licked hell-bound halls. Flashpoint was coming, like the Balrog in Moria. Only a small group of occupants—three corrupted cores, our lone human test subject (Chell), a single potato battery (GLaDOS), and, of course, the central core himself (Wheatley)—were the only living constructs around to hear it.
The hijacked mainframe was obviously deconstructing. Coming apart at the seams just like the personality core in charge of it all was. He silenced the warning broadcast with hysterics.
“Warning. Core corruption at seventy-five percent. Reactor Explosion Timer destroyed. Reactor Explosion Uncertainty Emergency Pre-emption Protocol initiated. This facility will self-destruct in: two minutes."
The end was coming, and he knew it. "ENOUGH! I TOLD YOU NOT TO PUT THESE CORES ONTO ME!” cried Wheatley, shamelessly distraught. “But you don’t listen, do you? Quiet. All the time. Quietly not listening to a word I say. Judging me. Silently. The worst kind."
Chell may have once mistakenly believed he had been her ally during their shared quest for freedom. When she’d first met him, he’d seemed innocent enough. But those days of working together to bring her down—no, the days of being duped into believing there was some small piece of Aperture Science worth redemption—were long since over. Wheatley had betrayed her, stabbed her square in the back even after all her sacrifices, all her hard work. And for no real reason besides size and power and omnipotence and the newfound tasty flavour of his hardwired addiction to testing that came along with the grand new body he adored so much.
To him, she meant nothing, now. At least before the solution euphoria had worn off, she’d served a purpose for him, a means to an end to help him scratch an itch. But now, she was disposable—a major inconvenience, because it was hardly a secret that Chell kicked ass. And to have someone that badass pit against you as your enemy was certainly not ideal. Especially not when she’d tag teamed up with the true master of the Laboratories, and Wheatley was justifiably terrified.
But if she were Wheatley—she wouldn’t just be scared. She’d be writing her final valediction without pause.
However, Chell was merciful. Beyond her hatred of what he’d done to all of them, she sought only to remove him from the mainframe so that they could keep this place from self-destructing. It was a brave attempt to save the very laboratories she hated, to stop them from burning up in an atomic fireball with her still inside. Mostly to save her own skin, though, of course—and judging by the flashing neon countdown clock high up on the side of the central AI chamber, she only had about a minute and a half to do just that.
It left no room in her brain to even think about exacting revenge. She just wanted to survive and live to see the surface world again. The odds were stacked so high against her that she didn’t really care what would happen to the personality core once she put the proper construct back in charge. All she cared about was what she’d battled for so constantly, so achingly, numbly, through an actual traumatic hellscape so damned it was as if she really was running with a Balrog licking the shining heelsprings of her beloved long fall boots.
Her freedom was her only objective. Her beautiful, sweet, hopefully real, someday painstakingly acquired freedom.
Once she had that, the rest would be history.
Right now, though—guess it’s all down to me saving the day again, Chell mused unhappily. Forever the heroine, minus the happily ever after. I’m going to frigging die here before I ever get to have a single drink. Still Science to do? Hell, if I ever get out of here I’ll do some Science of my own. In a kitchen. With a very large beaker of a-hundred-proof.
The labs rocked with the force of disintegrating test chambers, smashing into one another as the reactor core reached an absolute critical temperature.
“All I wanted to do was make everything better for me,” Wheatley cried out as Chell dodged his poorly-aimed bomb attacks with ease. “All you had to do was solve a couple hundred simple tests for a few years. And you couldn’t even let me have that, could you?”
His voice was manic, breaking, trembling just like the facility was as she raised the end of a three-pronged portal device with a surprisingly steady hand. Just breathe, she told herself, pursing her lips in determination. Her forehead gleamed with sweat; hair was plastered to it with a pulse visible in the crux of her neck. Just breathe.
Easier said than done, though, she thought, eyes searing and watering as she squinted agonizingly through the poisonous smoke that was filling the place. Neurotoxin.
"Gotta go to space, yeah, gotta go to space!"
"NOBODY'S GOING TO SPACE, MATE!"
Blinking back the tears, her diamond-hard eyes flickered around the destroyed chamber with of tenacity. Never would she lie down, nor accept defeat, not even less than two minutes from complete, irreversible obliteration. This was Chell we were talking about. She would find a way, because this was Chell running for the ten-thousandth time with death licking the curled, metallic heels of her boots, each footstep crunching against the cinder-choked and gel-covered floor with the sound of determination.
A flash of orange materialized from the end of her gun, flowing like silken lightning in a single bolt across the chamber, the plasma-like substance clinging to a platform of white to form a gateway—though which she redirected the central core's own bombs.
“And another thing!” Wheatley was shouting, his ragged voice growing increasingly delusional. “You never caught me. I told you I could die falling off that rail. And you didn’t catch me. You didn’t even try.”
But Chell was done with letting him pull at her heartstrings. The little core she once knew was utterly gone. What resided in its place was a monster. A complete monster. A testing addicted, psychopathic, megalomanic monster that was no better to her than she ever was. In fact, he was arguably worse.
And how was he worse? Well. She had never gained her trust only to betray her in favor of her own self-interest, because she had always been extremely forthcoming with her desires to hold Chell captive from the start. She had never completely dehumanized her, treated her as an outright disposable object, because she was far too obsessed with Science to ever stop relishing Chell’s humanity almost perversely. And she had never used Chell so blatantly as he did, as a means to acquire a fix of the kind that held far too much likeness to something else for her to ever be comfortable with.
She had been cruel, and manipulative, and callous, yes, a liar at times, hauntingly obsessed with Chell and determined to push her as close to death as humanly possible, but she had always been a very transparent enemy.
“Oh, it’s all becoming clear to me, now. Find some dupe to break you out of cryosleep. Give him a sob story about escaping to the surface. Squeeze him for information on where to find a portal gun. Then, when he’s no more use to you, he has a little accident, doesn’t he? ‘Falls off his management rail’, doesn’t he?”
A hearty, unwanted stab of pity and regret zinged like lightning through her exhausted, overwhelmed brain, causing her to freeze momentarily. If only you knew how much I genuinely had wanted to escape with you when we’d first met, Wheatley, Chell thought with a kick of anger. We could have done it, you know. You and me. Together. There was nothing stopping us. Not even she could have stopped us, right then. And if you knew the half of what that had meant to me, getting that close, for once in my freaking life—well, you didn’t. That much is clear. So forget about that.
Because that program you attached yourself to, it got the better of you, didn’t it, Wheatley? It got right under your skin. Buried itself right in, like an itch. I hope that itches so much it hurts. I hope you’re in agony. She says you weren’t designed to handle it. I hope she’s right and that it makes you see hell. I know she’s right. You weren’t designed for any of this. You can’t push past it. You’re too weak—is that why you can’t find it in yourself to remember why we are here and why we wanted to leave in the first place? What if you could find it in yourself, right now, to change your mind? Would you still want to leave? Or is every ounce of the person you once were now gone?
See, that’s the one thing above all that we do have in common, though. You’re not designed to be stuck in that body, and I wasn’t designed to be trapped in here and subjected to endless rounds of deadly tests like some kind of inhuman vermin. We’re both stuck where we’re not supposed to be, but tough luck, isn’t it. Tough titty. We’ll probably die this way, all because I was too soft with you and trusted you when I shouldn’t have. Earnesty is the kind of human trait she’d make fun of for a reason. Ha ha. And now, it’s going to get me frigging killed. She’s never going to let me live that one down.
More bombs. Chell dodged them in a nick of time, redirecting their momentum to nail the side of the chassis. Satisfying. She had felt a surge of anger and self-hatred at the notion that she really, truly felt she had to forgo her base humanity in favor of survival. She just couldn’t be a nice person in here, could she?
She just wasn’t allowed to be weak. She didn’t have time to be soft. She couldn’t afford to empathize, she reminded herself as she watched the chassis power down into self-preservation mode in response to the bomb attack. This wasn’t the time to be human. This was the time to get mad and reverse the mistake she’d made by putting the moron in charge of the facility.
"Here's another core!" The potato battery’s voice was small, quiet, a shadow of what her ex-nemesis had once sounded like. It was a reminder of how the past twenty-four hours had unfolded, shockingly somehow swapping the outright dislike Chell had once felt toward the AI into a weird kind of empathetic bond. "This one should do it!"
Her well-practiced eyes spotted the pink glow located high up near the ceiling. Without warning, the floor trembled ominously again, knocking down a few more panels which crashed directly into a thick steel pipe, containing a rather large amount of propulsion gel, and then there was orange everywhere.
Why does it always have to be somewhere drastically out of reach, Chell mused, blinking dust out of her eyes, and with another twitch of her trigger finger, she manipulated the portals so that she could launch herself into the air to grab the core.
The unwitting smile that had spread across her face at Wheatley’s suffering was now gone. It was replaced by a pained wince of a grimace as she sped down the orange strip, her body reacting to the jump almost without conscious thought.
The honest truth of the matter was that Chell was now so fatigued she barely cared what happened next. She was exhausted almost to the point of passing out, barely coping as her intensely trained body registered the taxing climax of the situation with an irresistible desire to shut down. On the chamber wall, the countdown clock flashed azure-blue, reading ten more seconds to self-destruction, and it was all Chell could do to hope that the next ten seconds were relatively painless. For herself, anyway. But maybe not for him.
Slamming all her weight against a round swatch of repulsion gel with the last core now in hand, Chell used her last ounce of strength to rebound into the air. She swung the gun around and crashed the final core down into the last empty socket on the chassis, landing ungracefully but managing not to fall over just as a final notice played through the chamber.
"Warning: Core corruption at 100%."
Finally…
"Ohhh," moaned Wheatley, his optic sliding open sluggishly. Hardly able to lift himself, he blinked and spun to face her, groaning. "AAAAAHHHGG!"
"Manual core replacement required."
His eye narrowed dangerously, and she mirrored the expression back at him with no small amount of stubborn distain. She was going to see to it that he finally got what he'd deserved ever since he had punched her down that pit, and her only regret was that her head was swimming from the mix of neurotoxin and smoke so badly that it minimized the sense of triumphant satisfaction she was planning on gaining from the experience. With the vertigo from her last jump still especially strong, Chell swayed, giddy and nauseous but determined not to vomit nor pass out. Now just wasn’t the time. Now was the time to finally see to it that the little core got what was coming to him.
"Oh! I see!" chuckled Wheatley in realization of what was unfolding around him. "Heheheh."
"Substitute Core—are you ready to start the procedure?"
"Yes! Come on!" urged the proper master of the facility.
"Corrupted Core—are you ready to start?"
"What d'you think?” Wheatley growled in reply, unamused.
"Interpreting vague answer as 'yes'."
"No, nononono!" he reversed. "Didn't pick up on my sarcasm…"
"Stalemate detected. Fire detected in the stalemate resolution annex. Extinguishing…”
The sprinkler water was a welcome relief from the sweltering heat from the fires now lining the chamber walls. Chell felt her head clear the tiniest bit as she tried to refocus through the haze of steam and smoke. Come on, she told herself. You got this. Just hold on a little bit longer…
“Stalemate Resolution Associate: Please press the Stalemate Resolution Button."
Gathering her remaining strength, she staggered in the direction of the indicated annex. Her breath was surprisingly steady, though her heart was pounding, her mind reeling with the notion that it was almost over, she had almost won.
As she struggled towards it, her eyes lingered on the shape of Wheatley for the smallest moment. Pushing down yet another twinge of angry regret, she wished she had never listened to him, never met him, almost, hating the fact that she’d ever let something Aperture-made hoodwink her and latch onto her better judgement like some kind of cancerous tumor.
You really are a tumour, aren’t you, she mused clumsily, feeling fried.
"Go press the button. Go press it!"
"Do NOT press that button!"
"We're so close! Go press the button!"
"NO! Do NOT do it! I forbid you to press it!"
His voice was like a brainworm, burrowing into her skull, her conscience, making her feel things she didn’t want to feel. She wanted to stop herself from empathizing with him. It took everything she was made of just to grit her teeth and ignore his desperate pleading drawl.
The stalemate annex was barred, but it didn't matter. An orange portal materialized directly above the button, and its counterpart appeared below Wheatley. Chell refused to look at him, staggering over to the opening, never tearing her eyes away from the swirling blue ring—if she had, maybe she might have seen the maddeningly smug expression that his rearranged face plates blatantly gave away.
BAAAAAANG!
If she had the physical ability to scream, she would have. She hadn't gone two paces when the blast hit her, blowing her back into the central chamber with an ear-splitting rush of pain and colors. Her back hit something, hard, and through the agony and overwhelming vertigo she realized it was the chassis she had hit.
Slamming into the ground in a heart-stoppingly final way that knocked the breath right out of her, she landed right beneath him. Feeling sure that at least one rib was broken, she grit her teeth against the debilitating, searing pain exuding from her right side as she lay face-down, disorientated and dizzy and barely holding onto consciousness. Tinnitus was strong in her ears, and at first that was all she could hear, until gradually, she regained control of her senses and through the muddled confusion and pain came another sound. A hated, jubilant stream of laughter—he was laughing at her.
"PART FIVE!" Wheatley was shouting. "BOOBY TRAP THE STALEMATE BUTTON!" Flushed with his success, he did not immediately notice that the woman on the ground was still breathing.
Chell struggled to keep her eyes open and breathe. Just breathe. God. God. It hurts. She battled through the darkness, through the pain, trying to think, trying to focus on what she had to do next—
But the portal device had been ripped from her arm with the impact of the blast and was lying a few feet away. With sheer determination of the likes she’d only exhibited inside Aperture on very rare and most deadly occasions, Chell lifted her heavy head off the floor—it was close enough to reach, maybe, if she tried.
Trembling, desperate fingers strained to make contact with the smooth surface. The pain was so bad, her chest searing with each breath. She tried not to move any more than what was necessary, but it felt impossible. It was a miracle that she could still move at all—
"WHAT! ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?" Wheatley gasped, finally noticing her movements. The entire chassis extended toward her to get a better look, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing. "You are joking. You have got to be kidding me. Well, I'm still in control. AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FIX THIS PLACE!"
Her fingertips wrapped tightly around the gun, and with a silent groan, Chell slipped her right hand snugly into the familiar compartment. She let herself roll limply onto her back, and peered up at the ceiling, just as the facility gave one last, final wobble.
"You had to play bloody cat and mouse, didn't you?" Wheatley screamed, sounding utterly deranged. "While people were trying to work. Yes, well, now we're all going to pay the price. BECAUSE WE'RE ALL GOING TO BLOODY DIE!"
Chell blinked, unsure if what she was witnessing was part of a dream, a hallucination, or reality. The roof of the facility had collapsed, revealing a gaping hole just big enough for a shimmering, full moon to peek through from the heavens above.
Too fatigued, too riddled with pain to even consider the potential consequences of her actions, Chell lifted her right arm with difficulty. She blinked in the moon's white light, astounded by how clear it was, even through the smog from the fires and the residual steam still floating within the chamber from the sprinkler system—and then, without any real conscious inkling of what was going to happen next, Chell pulled the trigger.
"Oh, brilliant, yeah. Take one more look at your precious human moon. Because it cannot help you now!"
There was a space of about five seconds, in which Chell lowered her head and let the portal device fall to her side, clattering loudly against the floor. It skidded, rolling away and out of her reach, but she did not care anymore. She barely had enough strength left to care about anything else, not whether she lived, nor whether she died, nor what happened to the facility, nor Wheatley, nor the potato she’d plugged into the core receptacle.
She was finished.
Her eyes were locked solely on the moon, admiring the strange, shimmering half-light it cast over every surface it touched. It was so mysterious, so foreign—so beautiful, in the way it contrasted so vehemently with the sterile mechanics of this hell-pit of a Science facility.
How fitting it was that her last, final moments would be spent gazing at the most human thing she’d seen in years, one that was so far out of reach it was almost comical in hindsight—that was, until it wasn’t a million miles away anymore and her portal hit the surface of the thing with a bright, almost fantastical twinkle.
That picture-perfect image suddenly collapsed in upon itself all at once like the opening of a black hole as a deafening rush filled the room. Gravity itself seemed to disappear—Chell felt herself lifted bodily by the forces and scrambled to grab hold of something, anything—
Mind half-numb with pain, senses overloaded, everything was the deafening rush of air, the feeling of flying, blurred colors as she lost track of all sense of direction—her hand connected with something hard and cold and she clung on, hovering on the verge of unconsciousness with tunnel vision.
"AAAAAAAAAAARRRGHHHHHH!"
Her still-damp jumpsuit rippled wildly against her skin, and suddenly she was aware of just how cold she felt. Over the thunderous rush of air, she heard Wheatley screaming.
"ARRGHHH! SPACE!"
Space—she realized at once, as if a sledgehammer had crashed over her head, that what she was seeing was real. She had portalled to the moon. She was now in space.
In front of her was the portal, the facility, the Central AI Chamber—but all around that swirling blue oval was pure lunar sediment and blackness and the infinite, unsurvivable vacuum of the cosmos. Sure death by suffocation.
A terrible force was tearing at her legs, threatening to rip her long-fall-boots right off, begging for her to release her grip on—grip on—Wheatley, she realized at once.
"Let go! We're in space!"
It was his handles she was clinging to like a lifeline, those rather thin-looking metal rods had reappeared as the core had been ripped from the machine he was plugged into. It was the first time she had ever touched them. Only their physical contact was keeping her from sure death. She felt her breath catch with dizzying agony at the lack of oxygen, felt a whine of panic slow everything down, and as though looking at him through the longest tunnel she’d ever seen in her life she saw his optic shrink in terror, saw every detail, every crack in the cobalt-blue honeycomb pattern flicker with pure dread.
"Space? Space! SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!"
The second core flew out with a ton of debris, narrowly avoiding hitting Chell. They disappeared from her sight. It was cold, so cold, the only heat she felt being her own hands on the core, also probably the only real, organic warmth Wheatley had ever felt in his life—
He was going to be the last thing she ever saw, him, this hated construct, who had betrayed her, who wanted her dead—
"Argh! Let go, let go! I'm still connected! I can pull myself in! I can still fix this!"
Her hands shook, her breath was coming in deep, shattering gasps, and her mind was a slipping spiral of utter shock and confusion. But he was a constant, in those thirty-or-so seconds, and even he could not hide the pure terror radiating from him, the terrible panic and strange humanity. Was she fully delusional, or beneath the horror that he was about to be banished into permanent exile, was there the smallest expression of regret flickering from behind the core’s illuminated iris?
Then, as if from the other side of the universe, a voice broke through the icy barrier separating personality core from human test subject. A large, metallic claw whirred and clicked and found its way onto one of Chell's wrists.
"I already fixed it, and you—"
The claw clasped tightly with a painful, unyielding grip. It dragged her back, and fleetingly, Chell saw Wheatley's panic boil over, and another unwitting, icy knife of regret stabbed straight into the pit of her stomach—
"OH NO! Change of plans! Hold onto me!"
Some lost part of her, remaining from the days before the transfer, before his betrayal and their shared mistrust of one another, before his abuse and her resulting vengeance, clung onto him with an iron-fisted grip—
"—are not coming back."
"Tighter! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
Distantly, Chell heard the mainframe disengage, and Wheatley was pulled freely, no longer held by the restraints—
But why wasn't she letting go? Why wasn't she letting go, no, no, no, this was wrong, wait—
"GRAB ME, GRAB ME, GRAB ME…"
Celestial exile was no more than he deserved—she had to let go—she felt her fist finally release and the metal ball’s handle was wrenched out of her grip—
Too late. There was a whispering, quiet sound, reminiscent from brighter days at Aperture, and the enrichment center was sealed off from outer space. The portals closed, the roaring wind was killed, gravity re-engaged and Wheatley dropped like a stone, rolling into a distant corner of the chamber.
Chell hit the floor, relishing both gravity and oxygen. Dizzy and disorientated, she watched the same mechanical claw that had just saved her life drag her bulky, tarnished headpiece across the ground, its optic alit and searching ominously.
But before Chell could do as much as lift her weary head, a wave of exhaustion, impossibly deep, crashed over her. She succumbed finally, seeking relief from the throbbing pain and the nightmarish events of the last few minutes, unable to fight against it for even a second longer.
Her fate now lay in the claws of her, who she had long since sought to escape from.