Prompt Post Round 1
Prompts go here! This will be closed and a new post made at 3000 comments. Please link all fills to the Round 1 Fill Post.
This post is closed to new prompts! Post prompts at Round 2! Fills and comments can still be posted here.
This post is closed to new prompts! Post prompts at Round 2! Fills and comments can still be posted here.
Attractive humans, he mused, had bodies whose shape varied down the length of them-not all straight down like his, but a different sort of shape, a really quite lovely one. Wide then narrow then wide again. Attractive humans had their soft bits situated in much nicer places than his. Attractive humans were shorter than he was, they had longer, smoother, dark hair, and-and small hands. Dainty hands. He pursed his lips and stared at his own. Grotesque.
Attractive humans had smiles that rarely came, but when they did, they lit up even the darkest corridor. They always had this serious look on their face, like they might be mad at you but you couldn’t really be-
He stopped himself, eyebrows furrowing in mild confusion. Why was he even dwelling on this?
He really hadn’t given it very much thought before, but, reflecting upon his newly acquired physical shortcomings, Wheatley decided that Chell really had been the most attractive human he’d ever laid his optic sensor on. Not that it ever mattered when he was mechanical, and certainly not that it mattered now that she was probably off somewhere either hating him or being dead. Probably both. Balling his hand into a fist, he lightly punched the bedcover beneath him and closed his eyes and cursing his newly-acquired gut for feeling so… bad.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’tthinkaboutit, he mentally chanted. The last thing he needed was to get stuck on his (numerous, inexcusable) past mistakes, when he had some still mostly unknown punishment looming over his head. He’d seen exactly what guilt and depression did to his past test subjects, and the last thing he needed was to fling himself over a handrail and fall to his death.
Pushing that image aside, he continued to reflect. Sure, her company had been-enjoyable? pleasing?-he wasn’t sure the word for it. He’d just been glad to have someone to talk to beside himself. But he’d never given a second thought to her physical form, at least not like this. What was it about this new body that drove him to think of her?
And why did it feel so nice to do it?
From the moment the thought of her popped into his mind, he’d felt nice, pleasant, somehow. Kind of happy. Fluttery. For no particular reason at all. Though the creeping, black guilt of his betrayal gnawed at the sides of that feeling, it intrigued him, in a scientific sense. Not that he had ever been a scientist. Apparently.
He glanced at the door. What lay beyond it was a mystery to the new man, a mystery he had relatively little interest in solving. Sighing again, he settled down further into his groove in the bed (he’d had no idea these things were so comfortable) and decided to put off the reality of his situation for just a bit longer.
As a personality core, he had always had access to a range of simulated emotions-joy, to drive him to complete his work successfully (coincidentally, not an emotion he often felt). Anger, to drive him to drive others to complete their work successfully. Sadness, to reinforce the lack of joy response upon failure to complete his work successfully. Fear, to keep him from hurting himself. All of these simple responses were programmed to initiate upon the reception of certain environmental signals and cues.
His entrance into the GlaDOS chassis had amplified these responses a thousandfold, overloading his admittedly lacking rational thought and decision-making processes. The addition of that extra dimension of feeling-those fleeting emotions of euphoria, rage, terror, and the rest-that had been both the most exhilarating and the most disconcerting result of the change.
Lying limply on the sheets of a bed in his new human body, he was coming to realize that humans, too, had their own complex circuitry regarding emotion.
It was nowhere near as intense and uncontrolled as the chassis had been, but that same radiating continuum, or flux, of emotions was present in this human body. Over the course of his few moments as a human, he’d felt disbelief, excitement, panic, embarrassment, and shame-all from constructs that he’d come up with. In his own mind.
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