Blue Sky - Chapter 9 - The Last Resort [1/2]
“I knew it! I knew she had to have something up her sleeve, I knew it was too good to be true! Saves me, brings me back here with all her little humany friends, makes out like she cares, bloody talks to me even, ohh, I knew it, knew she had to be planning something! And all that talk about my memories yesterday, well- well, that just goes to show she probably knew all along, didn't she? Surprised she could even keep a straight face, listening to me going on about my first memory back there, knowing it was all basically rubbish. Clever. Clever girl. Been playing me like- like some sort of, of really easy game. Ludo. Snap. Marbles. Playing me like a... a game of... marbles...”
Wheatley trailed off. He was curled up against the sofa, the lead in his hands, staring down through it into a world of his own. Whatever the scenery was like down there, in the sorry little dimension his mind was currently inhabiting, it probably wouldn't have made for a very attractive holiday brochure.
The bitter inner voice, the one that had so often been proved right and therefore had more confidence in itself than the rest of him put together, wouldn't be silenced. There was a horrible note of triumph in it, now, the smug I-told-you-so recklessness of something with nothing left to lose.
He could remember everything he'd dreamed since they'd left the facility, every scratchy, glitchy old human memory that being hurled into this new body had knocked loose, sent skittering into his head as he slept. He remembered her. The human- his mind cringed abjectly from the idea, pinioned like something clamped into a cage, desperate but unable to flinch away- the human he'd been- had known her.
Had wanted to-
And she'd probably seen everything, on her little screen there. She'd hooked his head up to this- thing, and she'd had a good old look. She'd probably seen it all, the whole lot, and just thinking about that made him feel sick and panicky and something else, harder to describe but something like rummaged through, his mind left carelessly open like a reference book she'd skimmed and tossed aside. It wasn't a good feeling- or, come to that, a new one.
“Just- just wasn't enough for her, was it? Not good enough me just telling her, about my memories, like she asked, ha, no, had to go and apply her tricky little human problem-solving brain. Probably thought, yeah, fair enough it looks like he's properly trying to remember, first memory and everything, but I know old Wheatley, can't trust a word he says, how about I just stroll in and have a look for myself?”
He twitched, the sick choking phantom feeling screwing itself up in what he had no reason to call his throat. He strangled the striped cord between his hands and curled up tighter, trying to overwrite it, trying to bring back the way he'd felt at the very end- that wonderfully blank, empty, painless feeling of being nothing.
“Why didn't she just-”
Art by Niki
He stopped, his rising, cracking voice cutting itself off in mid-sentence. Another memory-
[why
why didn't she just
just hold on why didn't she pull me back in I COULD HAVE FIXED EVERYTHING I could
(space I'm in space)
blows up it'll be her own fault and good riddance I could have FIXED IT it would have been brilliant, it would have been a TRIUMPH if it hadn't been for her and her best potato buddy back there, and now I'm in BLOODY SPACE and what am I supposed to do now? What am I
(I'm in space)
she should have let go while I was still connected! Selfish! Selfish, arrogant, traitorous little- you know what, I bet they planned this, all along, the whole time! I bet She was in on it right from the start. Probably having a party, now. A Wahey-We-Got-Rid-Of-Wheatley party. You know, if I'd had a party I would have invited you, love! Because that's MANNERS! Oh, she's never going to hear me, is she? Not up here in bloody space.
(ohmygod ohmygod space)
if she is, actually, still alive. Suppose, all those explosions, fire, whole place coming down round our ears, not to mention the whole sort of oxygen issue up here, she might've kicked the bucket. Or She- assuming they weren't both in on it, and haven't ruled that out, them both being in on it, definitely haven't ruled that out- She might have killed her.
well it's your own fault if you're dead, love! You have nobody but yourself to blame for that one! No good trying to pin it on muggins here, not this time, you've gone and done yourself out of your own alibi! Didn't think that one through, did you?
still can't hear me. Space. Keep forgetting.
(spaaaaaaace ah ah ah I'm in space)
you could have held on to me! You could! Kept your grip, practically all you were bloody good for anyway, grip, jumping, buttons, tests... and the portals... and yes, the odd logical conundrum, like that whole turret scanner rigmarole, and the lasers, but- but who flagged them up for you in the first place? Huh? Who woke you up, who got you that far? That's right, me! I did! And what thanks do I get? You didn't even catch me! You never caught me, even though I told you I could have died, falling off my rail! Even- even if you weren't in Her pocket the whole time- even if you were just trying to escape and therefore- and therefore completely blameless in the matter, that still doesn't get you off the hook for not catching me that first time! Even if you really were, only trying to escape, get up to the surface, like
(spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace)
like I
I...
oh... no.]
Wheatley's fingers uncurled, letting the knotted ball of cord flop to the rug like a throttled snake.
It hadn't taken him long to realise what he'd done. Freed from the fever-pit embrace of the mainframe, freed from the Itch and its endless drip-feed of desperate poison, his own shaky sense of reason had crept back in freezing threads. It had been like watching a single cold spotlight slowly turned up over the scene of some awful disaster, being forced to keep looking at the wreckage he'd caused until every horrible detail was picked out with perfect, illuminated clarity. Spiralling deeper into lunar orbit, with Kevin screaming unhinged glee in his audial processor all the while, he'd had nothing to do but regret, nothing to be but sorry.
Am I still sorry?
The question scraped at the back of his mind- weak, tired, but no less important for it, groping blindly for his attention.
Sorry. Sorry for everything, sorry for the things he'd said and done and tried to do, sorry for the trust he'd lost, sorry for repaying the faith she'd shown in him with that immediate, shameless betrayal- he was, and he always would be. Nothing was going to change that, not this loop of wire in his lap, not the pain in his neck or the unwanted human memories battering against his fragile train of thought like acid sleet. He was still sorry, not just because of where his actions had left him, not just because he'd known, floating up there, that if he ever got the chance to speak to her again, he'd bloody well better seem contrite if he wanted any help from her at all. He knew that he was sorry like he knew his optic was blue, or that the little sticker mouldering away somewhere in the dark a whole world away, still clinging in shreds to his old body's battered shell, had once read BRAZIL.
Maybe if he told her that, or at least tried, if he just went to her and told her that he was still sorry, honestly completely sorry, but he didn't want what she'd given him, if he told her he didn't want this unbearable landslide of understanding that made him doubt everything he'd thought he was- and worse, everything he'd ever thought he was capable of being- she might take it back. The bitter little voice of his paranoia, most of its venom drawn, snorted faintly at this, but he managed to ignore it.
“Not likely, but possible,” he croaked. “She might.”
He stood up, shakily, clinging to the edge of the big table like a mountaineer who has just spotted a goat chewing through their only safety line, the old wood (washed spotless after that morning's baking) cool and grainy under his avatar's splayed palms. Moving as carefully as possible (and yet still managing to hit every single squeaky floorboard with an accuracy no observer would have believed accidental) he felt across the room and up the narrow stairs, just grazing the low arch of the landing, and stopped outside her bedroom door.
No glimmer of ambery light, this time. No light at all, just an open door and an empty room, blankets neat and cushions piled in the pale stripe shafting in behind him from the upstairs landing's one small high window. His own shadow looked warped, far too long, a dark menacing odd-angled thing sprawling across the floor, and he backed away from it in a hurry and retreated back down the yowling, creaking stairs.
Now what now what now what-
Where was she? Had she just nipped out for a stroll? Considering what she must have seen in his head- had the notion that this human had harboured a bit of a- a thing for her all that time ago- had the very idea been so horrifying that she'd just taken off, unable to stay in the same building as him for one more second?
Desperately, he felt through the disorganised mess of log files in his head, all the way down to the neat tidy bundle of the avatar's human-behaviour protocols. The parts of code that belonged to the small information-heavy light-bee felt much less like him than any of the data that he'd carried with him from his old spherical body- it hadn't had the chance to wear in yet, to gain any of the illogical little quirks and peculiarities he tended to etch into the coding he had to access on a daily basis, all the neat shiny corners of the algorithms knocked off and various impractical shortcuts and unwieldy mnemonics scratched over the top, the route markers of his own rambling, organic trails of thought. The avatar device's unique coding was still mostly free from his [intelligence dampening] influence, and with her missing he found himself reaching frantically for it like a higher authority, the only one he had left.
“There's got to be something in here. Some sort of protocol, little How-To guide- How To Get Rid Of Human Memories, that'd be a good one, that would be absolutely ideal right now- nnnnot readily apparent, though, if it is in here it is bloody well hidden. Would help if there was an index, of some kind... search function... anything? Anything useful at all?”
[Error. Please contact an engineer.]
“Right, that's- No, useful, I said. Full. Not less. I can't contact an engineer, reason; they're all dead. Unless I- held a seance- no, that probably isn't feasible, at this stage. All the engineers are dead, fairly sure about that. Neurotoxin, probably, got them in the end- it is pretty lethal stuff, as the name suggests. Anything else?”
[Error. Please contact an engineer.]
“No. Hm. I suppose I could improvise a sort of ouija board, a communicative tool of some s- wait. Wait, wait, hang on-”
Wheatley turned in the centre of the small front room, blinked sightlessly, pupils flaring brief bright blue in the gloom, scrabbling through the thready white-dark-amber complexity behind his eyes.
“An engineer... does it- does it, actually, specify what kind?”
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Chell walked south from the bottom of Otten's Field, the tall shadow of Foxglove at her back, heading through the long grass for the series of small, gentle-sloping hills known locally as the Boneyards. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the starry sky, felt the breeze on her closed eyes and sweat-damp forehead, and breathed.
The night was pleasant, fresh, quiet. She'd thought she'd heard something howl off in the distance, a little while ago, but although she'd stood quite still and listened for a whole minute's worth of even breaths, she'd heard nothing else. This was something that had taken her a little while to get acclimatised to, but it wasn't by any means unusual. Out here, as peaceful as it seemed, there was often something- fox, owl, coyote, even a wolf, sometimes- screaming in the night.
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-THUD.
Garret Rickey stuck an arm under his bed and grabbed the long metal-bound case from the dusty, parts-strewn shadows underneath, pulled it out onto the rug, flipped up the catches. He had been going over the blueprints for a particularly uncooperative servo relay at the sloping architect's desk in his chaotic attic room when the noises had started downstairs, which was why he was already fully-dressed and on-the-ball- if extremely tired, bleary-eyed, and not in the best of tempers.
There were a number of reasons he could think of to explain why someone might be making loud noises inside Eaden General in the middle of the night, and none of them were particularly good. Aaron wasn't expected back for a good ten hours on the inside, it had been a pretty fair business week, and he was alone. Foxglove was Garret's consuming interest and he would happily have spent every waking minute on her if he could, but the old man was the closest thing to family he had, and for as long as he was away from the store, Garret would Take Care of Business.
He took the stairs, edging past twenty precariously-stacked boxes of cornflour which Aaron had chosen to store halfway up the staircase, ducked under the stepladder leaning crossways across the stairwell. He walked carefully through the darkened stockroom with the ease of ten years of total familiarity, and stopped by the door, waiting for a clue, a further noise that would give him a sense of where the intruder had got to.
Something, obligingly, went CRASH.
Garret repositioned his hands, reached out, breathed, than in one quick movement flicked the lightswitch by the doorjamb and hit the handle.
“Okay, buddy, what the hell are- jesusChristalmighty! Wheatley?”
“Listen,” said Wheatley. He was leaning over the counter, inches from his face, wide-eyed, mad-haired, clingy with bits of dirt and tree. He was also at his absolute loomiest, so distracted that he was entirely forgetting to slump and therefore looked every one of his seventy-nine inches. “It's very, very important that you listen. I need you to stick a thing in my head.”
“Wheatley, I could've shot you!”
Wheatley blinked. They were nearly face-to-face (well, face-to-neck) in the sudden light flooding the store, the strings of bare light-bulbs strung ivylike among the high rafters. Somewhere out beyond the open doorway, a dog barked.
“With what?”
Wordlessly, Garret snapped the safety back on the hefty SPAS-12 pump-action shotgun in his hands. It was practically an antique, but that only meant that Garret had had more time and more spare parts available to recondition it, improve it, and generally mess around with it in ways its original inventor had never dreamed possible. The stock traced his hands in quiet soft-glowing red, and the bright laser dot of the night-scope wavered across the far wall.
It took a moment for Wheatley to focus on it. His eyes widened even further, and he stumbled backwards, bumping once again into the stack of paint cans which, once again, failed to register the impact at all.
“Aaah! Don't point that at me! Do you have any idea what those things do?”
“When you get your hands on them? Yeah.” Garret shouldered the shotgun. “Not to sound rude or anything, I mean, it's great that you've, uh, dropped by, but... what're you doing wandering around the store in the middle of the night?”
Wheatley looked down, breathed a long and completely oxygen-free breath out into his hands, scruffed through his hair a final time.
“Right, okay, good question. What am I doing wandering around in your store in the middle of the night, answer: looking for you. You weren't out in the field with the big old whatsit-”
“Foxglove?”
“Yeah, you weren't there- not that surprising- middle of the night, and I just thought, bing, lightbulb, maybe he's in the store! I mean, he seems to work there, sometimes, so it's definitely worth a shot. And here you are! Brilliant. Anyway, here's the thing, just going to lay this on you. Here goes. I know you and I haven't always seen eye to eye-”
“Guess not,” said Garret, who just about came up to the hollow at the base of Wheatley's neck.
“-and we have had our differences, you know, rivalry, animosity...”
“We... have?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Wheatley, although his manic, not-very-happy grin failed to undergo any sort of appropriate change. “I don't like you.”
Garret blinked. “Okay...”
“Oh, don't take it like that, mate, it's not personal. I mean, it is personal, sort of, quite personal, you're all clever, and you're all... climbing things and... and knowing what things are called, and you've got that beard, and- and bit shaky on why but it all just makes it a bit hard for me to look at you without having this sort of urge to find something handy for taking a, a sort of swing with, and getting you right in your beardy-weirdy, clever ol' face. It's not very noble of me, I am aware of that, it's not really in the spirit of 'may the best man win' and all that, it's just that what with everything else that's just gone off in my skull here, not much I can do about it.”
“Wait,” said Garret, slowly, starting to smile. “Are you saying you're jeal-”
“You've- you've got a real mean streak, you have, you know that?” Wheatley cut him off, heedless, twitching, his hands tightening in a white-knuckled deathgrip on the edge of the counter. “Playing your little games, right from the start, you knew bloody well I didn't have a clue what you were talking about, with your- your three-eights crimper, if that's really what it's called- probably isn't- should have seen that little ruse a mile off. You- you just like watching me panic, don't you?”
“What-”
“And then, and then you go off and leave me in charge of this place, knowing, knowing I'd mess something up. Oh, yes, I see it all now, ‘oh, that’s a brilliant idea, give Wheatley enough lead and he'll throttle himself with it, I don't even have to lift a finger!’ Clever! Very clever, always managing to make me look bad, every time you show up, es-especially in front of her! I don't even know why I even thought you-”
“Hey.”
Wheatley stopped. Garret was staring at him, freckly brow knotted in confusion, his expression equal parts worried, very slightly amused, and-Wheatley wasn’t sure, he was getting better at reading Chell’s face but other humans were still mostly closed books to him- maybe just a tiny bit hurt.
“Are you done?”
Wheatley felt a sudden lurch of shame. There were times- and they were often the worst times, when events seemed to be falling out of his power to fix them, when he felt upset, when something unpleasant or painful was lurking inevitably on the horizon- there were times when he just didn’t seem to have any control over his mouth whatsoever. Every single negative, unjustified thing he was thinking came falling out of his vocal processors, at no point bothering to consult his actual mind. Which was a shame, because his actual mind was under a lot of pressure at the moment, but it still might have had something to say- had it been asked- about how mean and petty- and stupid- it was to start having a go at somebody whose help you needed, somebody who was quite literally your last hope.
Stupid, stupid, to lose grip of who was on your side so easily, so stupid that it was probably something they'd done to him, all part and parcel of the whole 'terrible ideas' thing, the point of his existence. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted, needed, to forget this, this horrible suspicion of how much smarter- better- he might have been, before.
“Er. Yes, yes I am, done. Sorry. Didn't- um- didn't actually mean any of that, don’t know what came over me, really. Stress, I think it’s stress, I'm just a bit-”
He sagged. “Never mind. Not really getting the problem solved, this, is it? Like I said, I need you to stick a thing in my head, and standing round here next to all the cans of sad bees gabbing about beards and, and who's jealous of who, is not getting us any further towards achieving that aim.”
“Okay, hold on,” said Garret, stowing the SPAS-12 under the register and, sensing that he was probably set to be in this for the long haul, wandering around to Wheatley's side of the counter. “That's the second time you've said that. Stick what in your head?”
“This thing here,” said Wheatley, and shoved the thing that had been stuck under his arm- rectangular and battered and wrapped in a long tangled lead, into his arms.
“Now, I found this under her couch,” he said. “Yeah, you may well stare, odd-looking little gizmo, isn't it? Little-known fact, it is actually possible to use that thing to look inside my actual mind. Even littler- lesser- even lesser-known fact- it takes more than one person. Who is not me. And that is categorically not me being lazy, I promise you, I would absolutely much prefer to not have you fiddling around in my head, but the thing is, I really can't do this by myself. I've tried, I just tried, literally just a few minutes ago, and I definitely managed to ascertain that it is not a solo job. Gave it my best shot- you know, to hack it- I suppose my train of logic was that, yes, it was telling me to contact an engineer, but if anyone was going to be able to get the job done it would me, it being my head. But, no, bad idea, all I actually seem to have ended up doing is sort of accidentally deleting the colour yellow. Still got the word, 'yellow,' no issue there, but absolutely no idea what it looks like. Just sort of felt it go, just like that, ping, gone. Not the most pleasant sensation. Hoping it'll come back.”
Garret rubbed his jaw, one-handed, thumbed the skin under his eyes, propped his chin on the cash register. “Okay. Is it... at all possible that this... whatever the hell this is... can maybe wait til morning? 'Cause I did not sleep well- okay, at all- last night, and I was kind of hoping-”
“No,” said Wheatley, who had let go of the counter and was instead pacing off his agitation in a tight back-and-forth track between the potatoes and the paint cans. “No, nonono, look, you have no idea what it's like, being in my mind right now.”
He flailed his hands again, tracing twitchy tangled patterns in the air like a Mobius strip that had been put in a tumble-dryer, trying to demonstrate his thoughts.
“It's- it's like- aargghh- it's like it's one of those puzzles, for children, where you've got a bunch of holes and shapes and things, and I'm a round one, round block, and my whole- head- is suddenly a great big stringy- rectangular- hole and its like- no, no, I'm not going to fit. Not going to fit. And I thought you, being such a techie and everything-”
He stopped pacing. “Look, cards on the table, I recognise that it probably wasn't the best idea to come straight out and tell you that I don't like you, I can sort of appreciate that is not going to make you any more likely to help me, not really the greatest opening gambit I could have come up with. Um. Can we... start again, please?”
“Sure,” said Garret, sleepily, working a slightly sticky key on the cash register up and down with his thumb. “You want me to go out and come in again?”
“Er... no, probably not necessary, just- listen. I need you to get rid of my memories. Not all of them! Not all of them, that part is very important, there is quite a lot of stuff in here that I want to keep, but the thing is I just remembered a whole stonking great big chunk of other stuff, right smack out the blue, and I don't want it. I don't want any of it.”
“You want me to... delete your memories,” said Garret, sitting up a little and frowning, his fluffy sunbleached brows bunching on his freckly forehead, “with that laptop.”
“Yes, exactly, you've got it, can we get on, please? Sooner the better.”
“Yeah- you know, I think maybe Dr. Dillon might-”
“Look,” said Wheatley, grabbing the lead. “I'll even get it started for you. Hang on, this is a bit technical-”
Getting a fiddly little three-pin connector to fit into a socket is tricky enough in the first place. Getting a fiddly little three-pin connector to fit into a socket when you've only had hands for less than a week is even trickier. Getting a fiddly little three-pin connector to fit into a socket located on the back of your own neck, when you've only had hands for less than a week and your head is exploding with fractured bits of memories that don't even feel like they belong to you, and your hands are shaking like you're going through early-stage testing withdrawal, is a hell of a feat, and Wheatley managed it on the fifth try through sheer luck.
“Ah! There, got it. Other bit goes in here, just plug it in, click, like that, and then what you do is, you push this thing on the flat bit, like this, and it makes this noise. Wait for it-”
The laptop, starting up, played a short, lo-fi three-note tune. Wheatley managed the ghost of a gawky grin.
“I like that bit. Annnd... there, see. New hardware detected. That's me, that is, I'm the new hardware. Thing is, that's about as far as I got. Had a bit of a poke, ping, oops, no more yellow. Bit leery of carrying on after that, sure you can imagine, sooo... there you go. Over to you, Mr. Engineer, this is the part where you, er, help me.”
He paused, looked up. Garret had stopped frowning, and was instead standing there by the shelf full of sad bee spraycans with his mouth hanging open.
“What?”
“Holy God,” said Garret, softly.
“What you're looking for,” said Wheatley, shoving the laptop along the counter towards him, hardly mindful of the lead still attached to the back of his neck, “is- is anything to do with bagels, or needles, or, well, just sort of... being human. In general. That's the problem area. None of that, we don’t want any of it, surplus to requirements. Get rid of it.”
“That's... that's my codec.” Garret reached out, nearly touched the laptop's dim orange-lit screen, stopped. “The one I wrote for... but... how...”
His fingers curled into a dazed pointing gesture, following the line of the lead, from the connector in the laptop's side port all the way along the counter and upwards to Wheatley's neck.
“You're... I don't... I...”
He gave up.
“I need a drink.”
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Moving as if he wasn’t quite sure if he was awake or not, as if his grasp of certain fundamental principles of the universe had just taken a pretty hefty thumping- which was pretty much the case- Garret wandered through into the stockroom. Wheatley trailed unwillingly in behind him, ducking the doorframe with millimeters to spare, carrying the laptop in his arms and threatening to trip over the dangling lead jacked into the back of his neck with every step.
Garret made it as far as a half-disassembled reclining armchair which sat, most of its vital machinery exposed, between a heap of pistons and the oversized-bike-wheel thing hanging on the wall. He thumped dazedly into the cushions, staring at Wheatley like a wheel-carving Stone Age genius suddenly handed the blueprints of a Jaguar XKR.
“You've got a- you've got some kind of… hard-drive, in your head.”
“Well, ha, no, actually, dzzz, close but no exit. I sort of am a hard-drive in my head. All this bit,” Wheatley indicated the rest of his hard-light body with both hands and an impatient up-and-down movement, nearly dropping the laptop in the process, “it's just light, really. Not really sure how it works, lots of protocols, wireframes... but it does, it's all just solid, proddable, pokeable hard-light. Although, when I say proddable, I am not suggesting you try it, I don't enjoy being prodded. Same goes for poking, actually. No poking or- just leave all of that sort of thing right out, is the best idea.”
“You're telling me you're a robot,” said Garret. His grin started to grow bigger, and the eyes under the tanned freckly forehead started to get brighter and even more fascinated, even more amazed. “You're an A.I, like- jesus, like DOG.”
“Nnnot exactly a big fan of dogs.”
“You'd've liked this one. Trust me.” Garret sat up, fished under the nearest workbench, and came up with a clean jam-jar, just like the dozens nailed to the undersides of the stockroom's many, many shelves, an entire regiment of dusty rounded glass soldiers, filled with nails and bolts and a hundred other assorted bits and bobs.
His hands weren't quite steady, and the bottle clattered musically on the rim of the jar. He'd snagged it from behind the counter before leaving the main store, breaking the bright red-wax seal with a grimy thumb while mumbling something Wheatley hadn't quite followed about sheep and lambs and hanging.
“It’s crazy,” he said, shakily. “I can’t- I mean- you're made of light? How is that even-”
Setting down the bottle, he sneaked an eager sideways glance at the laptop. He didn't seem to be able to keep his eyes off it- and the lead, and the way it slotted into the invisible patch at the back of Wheatley's neck.
“Hey... mind if I-”
“Hey, hey, hey, paws off the goods, alright?” Wheatley scrambled to heft the laptop up out of Garret's reach. “Remember when I said I don't like being poked? Well, nothing's changed on that front in the last couple of minutes, still not happy with it. The point is for you to go in and delete the stuff I don't want; it's not a tourist attraction.”
Garret shook his head. “Probably should have clued me in when you were talking about, um, rebooting your nervous system earlier... and all the other stuff you kept saying, come to think of it, I thought it was a little weird, but I just didn't think twice about it. I mean, I just assumed you were-”
“Hey, hey,” snapped Wheatley, hugging the laptop to his chest with a lot more economy of movement than he generally employed; a spare, defensive little bracing motion. “That word- the one you're thinking of right now- I don't like it, alright? I'm sick of it. I just- I just don't want to hear it.”
Garret drank about half of the contents of the jam-jar in one gulp, gritted his teeth, hissed. “Shhhoot... what, 'human'?”
Silence. Glancing up from an idle attempt to balance the jam-jar on the arm of the recliner, Garret looked slightly disconcerted to realise that Wheatley was staring at him, goggle-eyed.
“Wheatley?”
“You... just assumed I was... human?”
“Well I sure as hell didn't assume you were a toaster oven! Jesus tillin' Christ, Wheatley, we've come a long way this last century, there's tech out there we never even dreamed we'd have before the Invasion, but you? I can't even- okay, sorry, I have to see-”
As Garret started to move, Wheatley attempted to snatch the laptop up out of his reach a second time, but Garret was ready for it and practically climbed his arm, grabbed his elbow, kicked off the half-built recliner, caught quite an impressive amount of air for someone with such a stocky, non-aerodynamic build, and grabbed it out of his hand.
Art by Eatherstar
“Oi!” squeaked Wheatley. “Hey, that's not fair, give it back!”
“It's my laptop,” said Garret, reasonably, placing the recliner between himself and Wheatley and backing off to the maximum safe distance that the lead would allow.
Wheatley lunged clockwise around the recliner. Garret stepped back, maintaining the distance, flipping the screen of the laptop open. The lead swayed between them as they circled haphazardly around the chair, running over Wheatley's stooped shoulder and tugging dangerously at the back of his neck.
“Ohhhh, it's your laptop, is it? Oh, sorry, clearly, that just makes it perfectly acceptable to- wait, whoah, whoah, time out, it's your laptop?”
“Yep,” said Garret, typing rapidly, one-handed, the keyboard balanced in the crook of his arm, dodging Wheatley as he made another long-armed grab. “Holy cow, look at all this stuff! What kind of OS- what is this running on?”
“Me! Remember? Me, here, big old wire stuck in my neck- and while we're at it, never mind it being your flipping laptop- if it is, jury's still out on that one as far as I'm concerned- it's my mind!”
“Hey, you said you wanted me to look!”
“Yeah- well- I've changed my mind, it was a terrible idea. I've gone right off it now, you're way too into this, far too enthusiastic about the concept of poking around in my brain. I'm not comfy with it at all.”
“Oh, well, excuse the hell out of me, you’re only the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in the field of experimental electronics, you’re totally right, I should be bored out of my skull!”
“Come on, look, I am not in the mood for this, you’re just being childish now, not to mention we look completely ridiculous dancing round this chair like this, so just give it ba-”
He stopped dead, so abruptly that Garret, still retreating absently around the chair in an anticlockwise direction while trying to type, caught up and nearly fell over him.
“…am… amazing...?”
“All this code- I mean, who wrote all this stuff? It doesn't even read like someone built it, it's way too organic, it's more like- a translation, or-”
All of a sudden, Wheatley's voice had become very small. “Sorry... just to clarify... did you just call me-”
“Oh, my God,” breathed Garret, fingers flying, “your linguistic centre- natural language processing, parse trees, nanosyntax- your vocabulary alone, it's impossible- ”
“...trees? What... what've trees got to do with- ?”
“You're amazing,” said Garret, slamming the laptop closed as if he didn't actually trust himself to ever be able to resurface if he looked at its contents for even another second (which, again, was more or less the case). He stared up at Wheatley in utter fascination. “You are unbelievably, astonishingly, incredibly… amazing.”
Wheatley swallowed, blinking rapidly. He looked stunned, pink around the eyes, terribly vulnerable.
The simple fact was that he had no natural mechanisms to deal with this. He'd evolved complex coping strategies for being told he was rubbish- he'd had plenty of time to work on those- but nobody had ever told him what he was supposed to do if people suddenly turned round and started using words like amazing and astonishing at him. He was completely overwhelmed, and fairly terrified.
“...thanks?”
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()~~~~~~~~ click here for part 2/2~~~~~~~~()