Blue Sky - Chapter 12 - The Fall of Eaden [1/2]
(Art by K! It's a hell of a thing.)
“Please proceed to the chamber-lock.”
They proceeded.
Beyond the interlocked halves of the sliding door, they found not a testing track but several miles of gloomy, emergency-lit corridor, grey and featureless. It had a hurried, half-built look about it, parts of the walls shelled of their brittle ceramic covering, parts of the floor beneath them giving way to clunking swathes of steel mesh.
Orange lagged behind, weighed down by the heavy piece of equipment which the assembly pod- much to Blue's dismay- had connected inextricably to its narrow, rounded back. Blue- still suffering from a minor case of gadget jealousy- exhibited absolutely no sympathy.
They jogged on for the best part of an hour, keeping up an even pace, bickering half-heartedly in their chirping wordless half-language, until eventually the corridor dead-ended in a flat white wall.
Blue shrugged at Orange, who poked the wall with a cautious flat-jointed finger, then leapt back as the whole thing slid apart, juddering and shaking, revealing a great hazy vault of cold air full of strange, blocky, crumbling shapes. It stretched away before them, far beyond the range of their optics- cracked charcoal-grey walls bristling with huge cranelike arms, whole banks of interlocked caterpillar-treads the size of inverted skyscrapers, strung with more and more of the oblong, barcoded shapes. If the two small robots had had any idea of the concept of a 'hatchery', they might have seen the resemblance- hundreds of empty, decaying building-block nests, thousands of broken, suspended crate-things drooping from their guiding crane-arms like abandoned cocoons.
“This is what happens when you leave a moron in charge of a sensitive cryogenic containment facility,” the Voice had told them. “There are ten thousand Aperture Science Relaxation Unit Cryo-Chambers in here, and every single one of them is irreparably broken. I doubt that there are even enough functioning parts between them to assemble a thousand functioning chambers. Fortunately, we don't need a thousand functioning chambers.”
The Voice drew itself out in a single, long, decidedly wistful note.
“Yet...”
Panels shifted, metal screamed and groaned. Far above them, the great cyclical belts started to turn, grinding in huge juddering scraping pulses like shattering teeth, rotating bank after bank of the suspended units slowly out through the stale static-crackling air. The sound was deafening, like an ocean's worth of pent-up water thundering on metal. It was less of a sound than a feeling, thrumming up through the articulations of their legs from the shuddering catwalk beneath them, rattling their optics in their sockets and sending them staggering back and clinging to the doorway and each other for support.
“This is even worse than I thought. It's going to take quite a while. You two may as well get started. Honestly, it's fine, I don't mind. You just go on ahead while I stay here and do all the hard work.”
The thundering vibrations dropped to a dull roar. High above their heads, a long bank of cold-white spotlights buzzed and spat and flickered into life, snowing down years of dust in a milky spindrift as they turned in two sections towards the nearest wall. Blue and Orange looked at each other, then up at the distant pair of bright halos, ten feet apart on the pale age-stained panels and stuttering spasmodically.
“You will see two illuminated areas. I want both of you to place a portal, and then proceed to the elevator.”
They proceeded.
The elevator waited at the end of the catwalk, a long, spinelike, arched bridge of mesh and flimsy steel struts which shook and clattered under their feet as they jogged. Far behind them, the dislocated surfaces of the two portals on the high wall- one deep violet, one crimson- shimmered and rolled like oil on water.
They stepped into the elevator. It hissed shut around them, a closing fist that shot them upwards through a hundred dizzying layers of light and shadow, flick-flick-flicking, a barely-glimpsed endless landscape of hanging half-skeletal crates, black against the faint bluish background glow. Down here the light was the optical equivalent of the endless background hum- insubstantial, sourceless, an empty, perpetual reminder that somewhere, She was alive and watching.
The light blinked out, the elevator skimmed up into a new shaft, pitch-black and enclosed, as narrow as a strangled throat. The robots edged impatiently from foot to foot inside the capsule, which- detecting that its passengers were about as organic and conventionally 'alive' as a couple of house bricks- accelerated to a speed that would have forced a human's brain out of their nose like so much runny jam.
After several minutes of humming, high-velocity travel, the elevator hissed to an air-cushioned halt.
The two small robots padded cautiously out into a rounded, domed chamber, small and featureless. The walls were rust-stained and held together with long dribbled lines of welding, patched here and there with frayed, discoloured fragments of posters, bright printed colours faded to pastels and greys, blotched and stained with water and mould. Part of the ceiling had fallen through, and strong overhead lighting streamed down across the gritty floor in sharp-defined swathes.
“Alright,” said the Voice, as they squinted up at the bright glow. “Here's the plan. The moron's activated some kind of signal out there. It's an Aperture device, and it's his handiwork, all right- his slimy little signature's all over it. In fact, he might as well have actually signed it 'facility-destroying little idiot'- it would have been just as obvious. The point is, I can't influence the signal, but I can trace it. Whatever it is, it's not moving, and I need you to find it. He wouldn't last five seconds on his own out there, so it has to be somewhere near her. I have no idea why she didn't just drop him in an incinerator while she had the chance, but then, I'm an immeasurable genius and she's a brain-damaged homicidal maniac. I can't be expected to fathom her motivations.”
The dented metal walls blinked and flickered. A projection scrolled out across the dirty panels, looping around the entire circumference of the room, a single long string of digits. The two robots twisted to follow it, their bright optics blinking in the patchy, flooding light.
“These coordinates correspond to a location somewhere within the... next chamber. In accordance with standard testing protocols, I am not allowed to communicate with you once you enter, so it is imperative you follow these instructions exactly.”
They listened. The line of digits dissolved, reassembled, became a sharp-focused isometric model which drew itself rapidly out against the pitted walls as Her voice echoed on. The model rotated as She spoke, zoomed, showing the watching robots the shape of a simple map- a straight-line route between a green dot and a single radiating, blinking light. Orange nudged Blue and tapped a finger on it, the glow of the projection engulfing the neat little joint.
“And, hey,” she said, finally, “be careful out there. This is not a standard test. I'm not kidding, there are a lot of potential hazards. So many terrible things could happen to you, it hardly bears thinking about.”
The two small robots exchanged wide, edgy glances. The Voice had their full attention, and- having softened for a moment, almost concerned- it snapped back and sharpened like an unsheathed claw.
“Some of them are probably even almost as terrible as the things which will happen to you if you disappoint me.”
With a solid, rusty ka-chunk, a door-shaped gap opened up in the battered wall, cutting the projection in half and filling the small elevator chamber with the vivid, blinding overhead light.
“Good luck.”
The projection flicked off.
Step by reluctant step, like a couple of children playing a particularly deadly game of Grandmother's Footsteps, the two robots edged closer to the open doorway. After a moment or two, the glare receded a little, and they could both make out a few rickety steel-mesh steps, leading downwards. Blinking dubiously, Blue shaded its optic with a hand and squinted out into the light, then turned to Orange and gestured an invitation.
After you.
Orange backed off, pigeon-toed, shaking a quick, definite negative.
No way.
Blue rolled its optic, shrugged its linebacker's shoulders, took a step towards the door- then leaped aside, its startled gaze fixed on the chamber wall behind Orange, who whipped round to look and received Blue's solid hydraulic-assisted foot squarely in the middle of its overloaded back. Already teetering under the unaccustomed weight of the extra equipment, the spindly robot staggered, tripped on the edge of the doorway, and vanished with a surprised squeak.
With the point won, Blue followed at once; portal device at the ready and trailing its wobbling fearless here-goes-nothing scream.
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Wheatley was happy.
It was a peculiar feeling. He'd always considered himself a pro at being happy- perky, lively, generally full of bounce, you name it, being more-or-less sort of upbeat had always been his particular area of expertise. Admittedly, it wasn't that hard for him to put a finger- now that he had fingers- on a specific situation where he remembered not being happy, when for whatever reason he'd felt frustrated or afraid or panicked or just plain bored, but for the most part he'd almost always remained cheerfully, desperately optimistic. He'd never been given to moping- whining, yes, always, but the great thing about having a good old whinge was that it invariably made you feel better afterwards, so you could hardly say it wasn't productive.
The problem was that when he looked back through the blurring stretch of his memories, Wheatley had to admit that his never-ending optimism had run mostly against the grain of reality. From his first hopeful fire-up in the laboratory, through the long list of failed assignments, to the Relaxation Centre and endless years of patrolling and Sleep Mode and lonely boredom, his ability to feel good about himself and his situation had been totally reliant on his own shaky die-hard determination to make the best of things, and to not think too hard about upsetting subjects. When it came down to it, his happiness had completely depended on his ability to not see things the way they really were.
For the first time, he was starting to realise that there were different kinds of being happy. There was a whole sliding scale of happiness- a concept he'd never even dreamed existed- and up until fairly recently, he had only really felt this shallow little hack-job version of his own devising, a flimsy ersatz thing firmly rooted in denial and self-defence. He'd beetled around down There for decades, idling along in neutral, talking to himself and dodging rubble, being cheery for all he was worth and Not Thinking About It. Just like pretending you were capable was better than admitting you were incompetent, being blind and happy was much, much better than having a perfect 20-20 view of Hell. He certainly believed that.
But-
But then he'd met her, and the lines had been redrawn. He hadn't even realised it at the time, but even back then the successes had felt greater, the disappointments harsher, as they'd fought towards freedom together and he'd seen glimpses of- and even tried to imitate- her tight-knit fascinating human depth. He might not have understood it, but he'd seen it just the same, that why-not human determination pushed right up to eleven, her bewildering complexity throwing his own simple little circular self into stark relief.
Not much had changed, really, on that front. She was still bewildering and complicated and scary, she still had the power to awe and terrify him. She was a force of nature, the eye of the storm, she was controlled chaos with a ponytail and a calm, serious slate-grey gaze. She was fast asleep on his chest, and he was deeply, genuinely happy.
There was the difference, right there. This feeling was in a class all by itself, bright, warming, nearly painful but- man alive- worth it, so worth it. Somehow managing at the same time to be brand new and as comfortable as a well-worn track, it felt like it was far too big to fit in this body.
He'd been so caught up in trying to get a handle on the feeling that it had taken him quite a while to realise that she'd drifted off. They'd been talking about astrology; well, he'd been talking about astrology, and she'd been listening and offering the odd word of encouragement (which he hardly needed) and explanation (which he generally did.) He'd pointed out the difference between the distinct types of stars- 'little twinkly ones' as opposed to 'big bright ones'- and moved on to picking out the details of his own carefully-constucted zodiac.
“And that one,” he'd said, pointing, “see, that little sort of letter 'Z' up there, all those little twinkly ones, that one's the Management Rail.”
Art by Pinalinet
She'd given one of her nose-flaring little snorts. It was a gentle, uncynical sound, and he'd felt it more than he heard it, the slight jerk of her head against his chest.
“Cygnus,” she'd said.
“Er, bless you. And over there-”
“That's what it's called,” she'd said, gently. “Cygnus. The Swan.”
“What- really? They reckon that's a swan, do they? As in, bird, white, long slender neck? Just checking we're on the same page here, because, not gonna lie, I'm- I'm not really seeing the resemblance myself. Management rail, no problem. You can't miss it- look, there's the little connector bit, even- you've got the whole thing there. Just not seeing anything that avian. Oh- hang on though, that's a thought- maybe, right, maybe they've got it upside down!”
He'd made a quick, reproachful little hissy noise. “Classic error. Can't really blame them, though, if that's the case- it's a pretty tiring job, astrology- es-especially for humans, I'd imagine, all that staying up all night waving telescopes about. Person who discovered those stars probably passed spark out on his- on his astrology desk, the next morning, then his assistant or whatever probably comes along, doesn't he, sees the whole star map thing he's been beavering away at all night lying there, upside down, and he thinks, 'ooh, that one looks like a big old swan right there, where's my pen at?' and bang, named, damage done. Tragic.”
She'd laughed- silently, but he'd felt that, too. Sight was his absolute favourite sense, and out of the four-and-a-bit he had, it was definitely the one he'd miss the most if he ever lost it again, but just then he'd found himself thinking that maybe it wouldn't be so bad, not being able to see. Not if he could still feel things like that.
He'd wittered on about the Sentry Turret and the Catwalk for a little while after that, one arm propped awkwardly behind his own head, the other tracing tangled and largely incomprehensible shapes in big arcs against the sky. Eventually, he'd registered that she'd stopped responding, and after an initial moment of panic, he'd caught on that she was sound asleep.
She'd been awake for a good long time, now that he thought about it- ever since the previous night when he'd run into her outside the stockroom, and that felt like half a lifetime ago. A lot had happened in a very short time. Wheatley didn't get tired, not physically, at least- to him it was a curious, human concept, running out of oomph when there was nothing physically wrong with your machinery, needing to power down to recharge every few hours- but he had to admit that it would be nice to... switch off, just for a little while. There was no reason why he couldn't. There was nothing pressing to deal with, after all, nothing worrying that needed sorting. For once, there wasn't anything going down at all, apart from her quiet deep-breathing weight on his chest, and the strange-brilliant phantom feeling stirring inside it.
Still grinning like a loon- wondering, vaguely, if it was possible to get stuck this way- he settled back on the grass, and closed his eyes.
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This is not a standard test, She'd told them.
She hadn't been exaggerating.
This chamber was different from any they had ever solved, any part of the facility the two robots had ever seen. Even the old facility had been nothing like this, the deep-down-under parts they had explored on the search for bits of the thing now plumbed directly into Orange's slender back, the endless dust-tracked forgotten places far beneath Her reach, where abandoned human things still cluttered the halls and the stale air echoed with the strident, arresting voice of a dead man.
This chamber was so big that you couldn't see the walls at all. It had a huge shapeless ceiling which was nearly- not quite- the colour of Blue's optic, wispy with peculiar white fluff. There was an endless draft blowing from nowhere to nowhere, and the floor was covered in tall yellow stuff that looked soft from a distance but whipped and battered stiffly against their legs as they jogged. There were no portal surfaces, no elevators, no Faith Plates, turrets, or Thermal Discouragement beams, not even a single cube. Even more alarmingly, there were no familiar sounds, no dings, buzzes, ticks or crosses, nothing that told them when they were doing something correctly or even making any progress at all.
And- strangest, most disconcerting of all- there was no Voice.
They heard something that sort of sounded like a Negative Value Buzzer at one point, coming out of something sitting on top of a rail in the middle of the yellow leg-battering stuff, but it flapped sulkily off towards the ceiling before they managed to get anywhere near it. They watched it go, a fluttering stark-black rag against the blue, still making its harsh staccato buzz.
Things were weird in this chamber. Blue was the first to discover that if you dug at the floor under the yellow stuff it came away in your hand. You could sort of throw it, but it came apart in powdery drifts and clogged up everything it got into, as they found out by accident when Blue, trying to get rid of the stuff clogged between its fingers, hurled a good half-handful of it directly into Orange's optic. Orange, its attention divided between squeaking indignantly and trying to clear its vision, failed to pay any attention to where it was putting its feet, and promptly trod ankle-deep in a place where the yellow stuff gave way to clear liquid running fast over a bed of tiny irregular-shaped weighted cubes.
Orange threw a panicked fit, dropping its portal device and leaping around like a mad gazelle on one leg, shaking as much of the liquid off its foot as possible, but once it had calmed down enough to submit to a closer examination, they discovered that the liquid didn't appear to have done any damage to its leg at all. It was harmless.
This was probably the point at which both robots decided that- for all its fascinating new features- this chamber was not a place they wanted to stay in for any longer than necessary. Walls you couldn't see were odd, and a ceiling too high to make out properly was even odder, but the idea that someone would make a moat and then fill it with completely benign, non-lethal fluid for no reason wasn't just odd, it was downright creepy.
The two robots trotted along at a quick jog through the endless yellow fuzz. At last, the temperature started to drop, and the lights dimmed in the shapeless ceiling. An assortment of new ones turned themselves on in their place, but they weren't much good, tiny weak pinpricks with no pattern to them in the gathering gloom, and one huge white spotlight, which hung over everything and turned the sea of yellow stuff a ghostly silver around them. They were bewildered by this change, which seemed to indicate some kind of massive localised power failure, but they hurried doggedly onwards all the while, following the single straight line in their heads through the gathering darkness. The shadow-haunted scenery didn't look much like the neat isometric lines of the Plan, but they'd recognised it for what it was as soon as they'd seen it cutting off into the distance beyond the elevator chamber, a dark shallow-worn furrow in the yellow haze.
After all, a corridor didn't have to have a ceiling, or even proper walls, to take you to the solution. It just had to go the right way.
It took a long time. To them, used to challenge and teamwork and frantic split-second activity (and frequent, sudden, impermanent death) it seemed to go on forever. And then, at last, just as they were been absolutely convinced that they'd picked the wrong path, they spotted a vague glow up ahead.
They picked up speed, hurrying onwards, and the silvery-yellow stuff gave way to a softer, greenish substance, and there were and more rails and even a bristly, odd-looking weighted cube or two. And then, finally, there it was. High above them under the blue-black point-speckled ceiling, still maybe a ten-minute jog away but so close, standing high above the other lights clustered beneath it, there it was.
It was sheer relief to the two little robots to recognise something so definitely right, something that- in the middle of all this strangeness- was exactly the way it had looked on Her Plan. Orange let out a high-pitched little screech of celebration and went into a quick, hippy sort of touch-up shuffle, making the cut-and-shut construction on its back clank and slosh. Blue twisted its torso in a stiff-jointed moonwalking shimmy. The two of them high-fived with a hard metal-on-metal clack, then jogged towards the single, blinking red light.
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[00004]
Wheatley opened his eyes. The vague sleepy blink of his avatar's eyelids was directly linked to the dual optical channels firing up within, and an observer- had they been standing over him at that exact second- would have been surprised to see his irises flare bright, shallow blue.
[00004]
Numbers. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had a dim notion that these particular numbers carried some significance, but whatever it was, it it didn't feel particularly urgent. He blinked again and focused on the immediate view, which was limited to grass, stars, and- if he craned his neck- Chell, her dark ponytail falling over his shirt (which, although in dire need of a virtual iron, looked nearly luminous in the moonlight.)
There was something else there, something tiny and unfamiliar perched on the crumpled dark-blueish stripe of his tie, halfway between the blurry tip of his own nose and Chell's sleeping form.
He froze- suddenly wide awake- and stared at it, cross-eyed, focusing as hard as he could. Whatever-it-was had a lot of poky little legs and big long things coming out of its head, and it didn't seem worried about him staring at it at all, even though it was at least a hundred times smaller than he was. As he watched, rooted to the spot, wondering if it was dangerous and whether he ought to either try to flick it off or poke Chell awake or just simply leap up and run for the hills (or, in this case, away from the hills), it drew one of its long back legs against the other, producing a sweet, husky double note.
Skreep-skreep.
“Ohhh,” breathed Wheatley. “That's what you are, is it? That's that mystery solved. Funny, you sounded a lot bigger.”
The little thing chirped again, then- tik- vanished in a single sproingy hop. He flinched. “Oh come on, no need to take it like-”
Art by Modmad
[00004]
“AAH!”
He felt Chell start awake and immediately gave himself a hard mental kick for yelling out loud, but it had been impossible not to, with that great sonorous many-toned voice so huge all of a sudden in the back of his mind, resounding through his head like the stroke of a giant, submerged bell.
Chell sat up against him, rolled her shoulders, wincing. “What-”
Wheatley grabbed for his own head, pressing against the shockwave still echoing and fading in his temples. “Nono, it's nothing- it's- I mean, granted I don't actually know what it is to be honest, there's this- this sort of voice- wait- wait, no, I know- it's- it's Foxglove! Keeps saying my name- I mean, not my name, she's not going 'oi, Wheatley', or anything, but it's- well, sort of her nickname, really, for me- my handle, it's- it's a machine thing-”
“In your head?” Chell reached out, touched the long arch of his bent neck, the bare surface just below his hairline.
“Ex-exactly, in- in my head- hey, that's a point, no wires, she's talking to me without wires! Wireless! Huh! That's quite amazing, really, now that I think of it, I didn't even... know she could do that...”
Slowly, Wheatley raised his head. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Chell was moving, pulling him to his feet, standing as tall as she could against him and staring down towards the firefly lights at the bottom of Otten's Field. Wheatley, with a worried sideways glance, saw that her eyes were narrowed, her jaw set, her body as tense as a trapped nerve.
“Come on.” Two sharp, toneless words, and another yank on his arm, and then he was stumbling after her through the long grass, down the whispering slope, desperately trying not to fall flat on his face, which- quite apart from slowing her down- would probably bloody hurt into the bargain, never mind how soft all this grass looked. He'd learned the hard way that just because it seemed nice and fluffy, it didn't mean it was going to be your friend when you went smacking into it at high speed. After the firing range, he wasn't going to fall for that one again.
This had better be something pretty spectacular, he thought, in what he hoped was Foxglove's direction. He didn't have the first idea how to communicate wirelessly, didn't- if he was being brutally honest- didn't even really understand how all of that sort of thing worked, even. It occurred to him then that he probably should have asked Garret for a few more technical details while he had the chance.
Really, when he thought about it like that, it was a bit stupid of him to moan about not understanding how his own systems worked, when he'd never actually tried to find out. Somewhere, there was probably a manual.
Too late now, and all he could do was try to send thoughts in the general direction of up up up and a little forwards. He tried to help them on their way, fixing as sharp a picture as he could of his thoughts zipping through the night and pinging against one of her carefully-positioned satellite dishes, bouncing from there into her great slow stream of almost-consciousness like a single little ball-bearing flicked into the fizzing, ticking heart of a full-sized atomic clock.
Much to his surprise, he actually got a reply.
[error. admin [admin ID: garret_rickey] offline.]
“What?” he said, bewildered. He knew that Foxglove could hear him whether or not he spoke out loud, he could feel his own jittery little communication channel knitted in to the broad ever-streaming flood of data above them- but that wasn't the issue. His heart felt as if it was lodged in his throat (metaphorically speaking, since he had neither,) and he had no idea what was going on beyond the fact that it was more and more starting to feel like a Bad Thing, and he could no more have switched his anxious-autowittering mouth off than he could have suddenly learned to fly.
“I'm not following you- hey hey hey hey Chell- the- the fence thing don't leave me behind-”
Chell, who had cleared the stile at the bottom of the field in a matter of seconds, practically hurdling it in her haste, turned back towards him. He could tell from her edging feet and her pale, set face what it was costing her to stop, even for a second.
“She's- she's saying Garret's gone offline,” he said, his words running into each other in their hurry to get out of his mouth before she did a bunk completely and he missed his chance to tell her anything at all, let alone anything that might be useful.
“How?”
“Um- good question, that is a very good question-”
He looked helplessly up into the darkness, the tone of his voice skidding ever-further towards full-on finger-chewing foreboding. “Look, joking aside, love, come on, I think there's a slight possibility that you've got your wires crossed somewhere. There's definitely some kind of misunderstanding going on here one way or another, pretty sure, because- because he can't have just gone offline, he's human, obviously, and humans, humans don't go offline, well, unless- agh!”
Chell grabbed him by the hard-light folds of his shirt, the startling strength in her grip pulling him right down to her level across the bar of the gate, like someone preparing a catapult for firing.
“Boots,” she said, very clearly, into his face. “Kitchen cupboard. Go.”
“But- it- it can't be anything to do w-”
“Now!”
The word was a punch, an almost-physical shove in the back, not a request or even a demand but a rock-solid marble-carved declaration of what his part in the immediate future was going to be. It went right through him and slammed into the part of his brain usually reserved for his most fundamental protocols. The thought of not going- of arguing the point or stalling or trying to stay with her- simply failed to occur to him, just as it wouldn't have occurred to him to choose not to fall if someone had pushed him off a cliff.
His legs, which most of the time behaved as if they had half a kneecap's worth of common sense and co-ordination between them, suddenly decided that they were actually a proactive, go-getting pair of legs which were Going Places. He was halfway across the field and sprinting in the direction of the town before he even realised what was going on.
He might still have tried to stop, even then, but a snatched glance over his shoulder told him that she'd already pushed through the dark spidery gap in the hedge across the lane, vanishing in the direction of Otten's Field.
It's nothing, he tried to tell himself, ducking through a tangly copse on the edge of the field, getting a low-hanging branch in the face and sticking up an arm just a little too late to ward off what felt like half a tree’s worth of its branchy buddies. It's nothing, it's a false alarm. Just a lot of fuss over nothing, it's got to be. We'll laugh about it later.
Oh, he really, really wished he was a better liar.
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()~~~~~~~~ click for part 2/2~~~~~~~~()