Blue Sky - Chapter 13 - The Old Friend [1/2]
(Art by K! Its parents put it in a grow-bag when it was little.)
Chell plunged into the spiralling tube of the Excursion Funnel feet first, her stomach giving a single giddy lurch as the soft slow-moving stream killed her momentum and brought her fall to an immediate, drifting stop. The translucent bluish material of the funnel ghosted over her skin like a dusty breeze, drifting in finespun eddies from her fingers.
Before she could hesitate- before she could let herself hesitate- she brought the portal gun up fast and fired, once, into the darkness. A burst of blue flared on a pale, near-invisible wall far ahead of her, the socky aimless thpt of an opening portal. Behind her, the oval of stars and silvery grass flicked out of existence, sealing the way back.
She refused to allow herself to think about what had just happened- about Wheatley, about what he'd tried to say, about the horrorstruck look she'd seen dawning on his face in the split second before she'd turned away. She denied it, the whole subject. It was only practical for her to do so, the situation demanded nothing else. She couldn't afford to waste concentration on her feelings- not in here, where the slightest hesitation could get you killed in a heartbeat.
She forced herself to focus. Stretching her unnatural powers of mental segregation to the limit, she grabbed the whole hurting splintering unravelling chunk of her that had become tangled up in him and shut it away behind a cold slamming wall in the back of her mind, where it howled faintly at her but couldn't interfere.
Instead, she turned her attention to her surroundings- dim, hazy, vast. She was drifting at the centre of a long pencil-beam of twisting blue light, arrowing straight between two endless charcoal-black walls over an endless drop. The emitter was a bright triple-spinning speck far behind her, weaving an infinite funnelweb that held her in place like a bug in amber.
“There you are.”
The Excursion Funnel winked out, and she fell through the haze, bracing herself for the inevitable. She had a confused impression of thick, dust-buried panels far below her, thirty feet, twenty, ten, the panels sliding quicksilver-fast over each other in a stirred-up cloud of fluff and ash, opening a dark tessellating gash in the floor. She plunged through, hurtled down through a blur of charcoal darkness and landed- clunk- feet-first on a smooth, clean steel-grey surface.
She straightened up. In the dim underfloor glow, she could make out the too-familiar shapes of a standard elevator chamber, the slick dead wall-to-ceiling LCOS monitor screens which usually displayed the Aperture equivalent of a screensaver, instructional videos and waving stick figures, taunting stock footage of fields and grass. Her throat felt thick, full of a foul plastic taste- the disturbed dust, or maybe the liquid asbestos of the Funnel- and she coughed and spat, wiping her mouth on the back of her free hand.
“I'd like to think that, in your language, that's what passes for a civilised greeting, but we both know I'd be kidding myself,” said the Voice. “I mean, really. Would you do that in your place? Because even if you would, this is not your place. This is my place, and your mucous is not a required part of the décor.”
Chell stared flat blank-eyed hatred up at the nearest glassy red lens. There were three cameras in this smallish space, tracking her every movement- She, evidently, had wanted to make some kind of point. Hefting the gun in her hands, she circled the chamber, around the empty socket where the elevator should have been, looking for a portal surface, a crack, a sign, a way to begin.
“I can tell you're eager to get started,” said the Voice. “That's good. So am I. I just think we should go over a few ground rules first. So far, we haven't exactly been reading off the same page. It's a shame, because my page makes fascinating reading. It's all about Science. Your page, on the other hand, was written by a mute, destructive psychopath who really can't take a joke. I think, in future, we should just stick to my page.”
This was a perfectly straightforward request- or at least, it was worded like one- and it deserved a straightforward answer. With her eyes fixed firmly on the camera's unblinking red eye, Chell took a very deliberate step back and rammed the butt of the portal gun into the nearest monitor-panel. There was a sweet sound of shattering silicon, and a dying fritz of static.
“Vital testing apparatus destroyed,” announced a synthetic voice.
“Alright, look,” She said. “I'm going to be honest. You're good at this. That's not a compliment, by the way, it's just a statistical observation. The fact remains that in the face of overwhelming odds, despair is a perfectly natural, healthy response. Other humans give up when it becomes obvious that the situation is hopeless. You don't. There is something seriously wrong with you, and that's what makes you so perfect.”
Having given up on the inactive socket of the elevator as a possible way out, Chell felt across the walls, palms hissing on the flat monitor screens. The cameras tracked her as she moved, their scarlet eyes fixed on her back.
“It's funny, when you think about it. The one trait that makes you so invaluable as a test subject is also the trait that makes you the biggest threat to my existence that I have ever encountered. Now that I've had the opportunity of observing you at close quarters- much closer than I ever wanted, believe me- I've realised that your destructive tendencies only surface when you are trying to protect something you regard as valuable. Up until now, that's usually been your own life. I can't exactly remove that as a factor- we both know I need you alive. And you don't seem to be afraid of pain or physical injury. I have access to test data from hundreds of humans right here in my database, so I think I'm qualified to tell you; that's something else that makes you the freak here.”
A pause, carefully timed to give the appearance of consideration.
“Anyway, I was reorganising the files that the moron trashed when he was in my body, and I came across an interesting quote. A famous philosopher once said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I know, remarkably apt, right? Reading that made me realise: we've just been going round in circles this whole time. I threaten your life, and you recklessly, violently attempt to endanger mine. I'm actually pretty embarrassed about this. All the time I've been blaming you for your selfish, psychotic behaviour, it's really been all my fault.”
Chell looked up, slowly. The cameras gazed back down at her, calm, pitiless, hungry.
“I just haven't been giving you the right motivation.”
All around the chamber, panel by panel in a spreading, multiplying rush, the monitor screens flick-flick-flicked into life. At first glance, each panel appeared to show the same image- a slow-moving, slightly distorted panorama shot of a small room, a security feed in flickery, washed-out colour. Just an anonymous little cell, plain grey walls, a bed-
Chell stood like a statue, the gun hanging forgotten by her side, staring up at the floor-to-ceiling mosaic of monitor screens, a grid of harsh sparks reflected by her horrified eyes. No. The same bed, the same walls, different rooms, and there they were, there they all were-
Martin and Heather. Ellie, barely a bump in the cover of the queen-sized cryobed. Lars and Emily. Bill, Dina, Karen, Lindsay. The twins, hardly bigger than Ellie and God-knew-how-many chambers apart.
Romy. Garret. Aaron-
More, so many more, and she knew without any doubt that if she counted there would be a hundred and fourteen exactly, because it was all of them, every single one-
A helpless ball of wet tension rose in her chest, clawed and burning. She bit down on the sore place on her tongue until she felt it split, her mouth filling with coppery warmth. The pain was thick and savage and just enough to lodge the choking ball in place at the back of her throat. Her stomach was heaving and her eyes felt like hot stones in their sockets, but she struggled with everything she had left to keep them dry, the pain was bad but she'd rather bite her tongue clean off than give Her the satisfaction-
“You know, I'm kind of impressed,” remarked the Voice. The camera feeds panned in lazy side-by-side unison, back, forth, giving the entire chamber a queasy illusion of motion. “When I told them to bring back anyone they could find, I was pretty sure I'd have to settle for the moron, or maybe that cube you cared about so much. For someone so basically unlikeable, you certainly seem to have made a lot of friends. Of course, most of them probably aren't really your friends, but hey, we can have fun finding that out.”
Chell heard- in some dim red hell-lit place in her head she was recording every word the hated Voice said- but nothing showed on her face. She stared straight ahead, at the screen which was showing her Romy's cryo-chamber. She would have recognised that pale, dreaming face a mile away, even without the unmissable sheepy piled-up blaze of hair that framed it, flame-bright against the colourless pillow.
“For now, though, this is how we're going to do this. You're going to test, and you're not going to break anything, or trespass in restricted areas, or try to murder me, or conspire to rip me out of my body and put me in root vegetables. And listen, take your time. I mean it; I've put a lot of effort into working out these new tests, so I don't want you to feel like you have to rush. Now that I've renovated the Relaxation Centre, each of these cryo-units have a shelf life of around three thousand years- give or take a couple of hundred- so I don't see spoilage becoming much of an issue this time around. They'll all be fine.”
The elevator lock turned with a smooth hiss, the capsule gliding gently anticlockwise into view through the glass, the doors sliding open at Chell's back.
“If you behave.”
The screens snapped off. Chell backed away, took an automatic, sleepwalker's step backwards in the sudden darkness, then another. A third took her across the threshold, and the elevator doors folded closed around her, like a curious child cupping an insect in its palm.
The elevator was exactly as she remembered, too- a dim, rounded glass closet, close and claustrophobic, blue uplighting pulsing faintly around the walls from dull-glowing tubes set into the greyish panels around hip-height. It began to move, shuddering underfoot, a giant throat rumbling in a satisfied purr. There were no cameras visible, but that didn't mean there were no cameras at all- Chell knew by now that there was no place in here where you could ever be sure you were unobserved.
She leaned back against the wall, listening to the hum of the motor. She couldn't shut out the memory of Romy's face, and before she could stop it the image changed from now to back-then. Romy, the first human she'd ever seen, through a mist of tired blurred sickness that bright summer morning, four years ago-
-oh, honey, it's all right. You're going to be fine-
Mom, what's that blue stuff on her face?
Max, Jason, I want you two to run fast as you can back to town and get Dr. Dillon. Tell her there's- hey, hey, shh, sweetheart, don't move, you're safe now. You're going to be fine-
Romy, with her warm singer's voice and the confident gentle no-nonsense touch only being the mother of two accident-prone ten-year-olds could have trained. Romy and her wild drama-queen moods and her silly nicknames and her sillier crushes on decades-dead film stars. Romy and her children, her friends, her neighbours- all of them, all of Eaden, down here in the humming darkness, locked up in the sleeping shells of their bodies. Halfway alive, as cold as the dead.
The long sleep.
Dimly, Chell registered that she was no longer leaning on the wall, that she was sitting against it with her feet splayed out before her, the surface freezing against her bare skin where the slow slide down had pulled the hem of her sweater up to the small of her back. She looked like a puppet someone had tossed in the corner of the elevator- a puppet in a loose-knitted old sweater, with torn scratched shins and a dull, shock-empty, dead-eyed face, hugging the portal gun against her chest. It was cold in its ceramic-alloy shell, but there was a slight, radiating kind of heat to the heart of it, the soft-glowing inner tube. It was just above her own body temperature- fevery-warm- and she curled around it with a loose reflexive movement, stayed there as the motor hummed and the elevator dropped deeper into the ground.
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It was nearly dawn.
The sky was fading grey- the soft fragile grey of bleached wood, or hair turning silver- and the stars were dying. At any other time, Wheatley might have wondered where they were off to in such a hurry, but now, with his head hidden in the long, slump-shouldered cross of his arms, he couldn't even see them. He was so hunched and folded in on himself that- even if he'd opened his eyes- he would have seen nothing but a crumpled blue swatch of his own tie, a thin slice of the grey-stitched Aperture logo on his chest.
She left me she left me she left me she left me she left me she left me she left me she left me-
Yes, she'd left him, and that was panic and horror and hell enough on its own, but what was worse- ten, a hundred, a hundred-to-the-power-of-ten-all-the-way-up-until-you-ran-out-of-zeroes worse- was the way she'd looked at him, in that last second, like she was summing up everything he was in her head and just writing it all off, screwing that last precious little strip of paper up into a tiny ball and hurling it into space. And even worse than all that, was just how much it made sense. How much he knew, deep-down flat-out bottom-line knew he deserved it. Because, every time, that was how it worked.
When you fail, you end up alone.
He twitched, his fingers digging hard into his upper arms, went still. The pattern spun out through his mind, again and again, the miserable little spiral of cause and effect that had driven him scrabbling through his life like a spider trying to escape from a polished sink, clinging to the most hopeless of footholds and always, always sliding back down. Every time. The ultimate rule, the reward for all his failures, the one thing he hated- and feared- the most.
When you fail, you end up here.
It didn't matter that up until a short time ago he'd never seen this place before in his life. He still knew it inside out, knew it like he knew the bright codeworld behind his eyes, or the time-worn path of his management rail. Here wasn't any one fixed place, it was wherever you were. Here followed you, inside your head, whether it was a quiet dawnlit field or a dark empty smoke-stinking chamber, an endless circuit of overgrown tunnels or the glittering vacuum of space, because here wasn't really a place at all, it was a feeling, a great hollow frozen hole with you at the bottom, cold and sick and utterly useless, small and stupid and as alone as it was possible for anything to be.
You're not human.
Chell had never lied to him. She'd tried to show him that even if the truth hurt he didn't have to hide from it, that he could be someone better than that, someone braver if not brighter, someone who wasn't so scared of looking stupid that they tried to look like someone else altogether. He'd nearly been that someone- yesterday he'd touched it, like touching a frosty window with a warm hand will clear it, for a while. If he tried, he could nearly bring back what it had felt like, how for the first time since he could remember he'd really felt as if he wasn't missing anything, not a trace of all that perpetual self-doubting panic gnawing at the back of his mind, how good that had felt-
He drew his knees up tighter to his chest, the heavy curve of Foxglove's spiralled sheet-metal hoof pressing into his back. He'd always been brilliant at imagining the worst thing that could possibly happen- whether he wanted to or not- and his imagination wasn't done with him yet, not by a long shot. It marched unstoppably onwards, dragging him after it, hell-bent on giving him the full tour.
In his mind's eye he watched Eaden crumble like the facility had crumbled, aging and weathering and empty, like a mouth without a tongue. He saw plants creeping hungrily up over the buildings and dragging them down into their foundations, paint flaking, metal rusting, colours fading, walls tumbling in shivering floods of cracked brick and concrete, windows falling from their frames in cloudy spills of dustblown glass.
He saw the streets breaking up in crazy root-shot zigzags, the square becoming nothing more than a raw dustbowl at the centre of a huddle of anonymous ruins, as the world turned and the years passed and he sat here in Foxglove's green-shrouded shadow until she crumbled too, because as long as his little slug of metal and microchips lasted, as long as the sun that still lurked just below the hazy grey horizon kept on doing its thing, he would live.
He'd been happy about that, before. Now, no thought had ever seemed less kind.
Kind. Garret had been kind. Aaron, Romy, even tiny little Ellie Otten, they had all been kind to him. Maybe he had been kind, once, the human he'd been, before time and fear and damage had turned him into something that would do anything, anything, to save its own skin. Chell had been unbelievably kind, risking her own life and her own freedom for him, despite everything he'd done. She'd stuck with him, even though it must have been obvious to her- to anyone in a ten-mile radius, let alone someone as brilliantly sharp as she was- that he'd never be anything but his own awkward wittering thoughtless stupid selfish self.
He'd wanted to help, he'd wanted so badly to show her he could be brave, that he had her back. He'd wanted to stick with her until the end of the world- his or hers, it came to the same thing- but the moment he'd seen that portal, the cold blue path into Her world on the other side, it had all fallen away and something deafening and rock-solid in the front of his mind had screamed terrible idea and he'd just been so afraid-
You? he'd said, once. You're not afraid of anything! And she'd looked at him as if he'd been joking, but then her face had changed, subtly, and she'd said, Not true.
She hadn't been lying then, either. He'd seen her face when she'd looked through the portal on the barn wall, and her hard-to-read expressions were no longer the mystery they'd been at first. She'd been afraid all right, she'd been frightened half to death, as frightened as any sane person would have been. She'd been scared sick at the thought of what was coming, what she knew she had to do.
And she'd gone through anyway.
Art by Chelsea
Slowly, Wheatley raised his head.
He wasn't like her. She was so brave, and her bravery wasn't just not being scared of things, because you could be scared of everything and still be brave, if you only had the strength to face the things you were scared of, to kick them right in the teeth and go yes, fine, alright, I'm scared, but I'm doing it anyway.
He, on the other hand, had always been driven by the things that terrified him, the things that sent him skidding desperately off into the unknown rather than even think of turning to face them down. He was as unlike her as it was possible to be. Whether that was his fault or not, his personality or his programming, the way he'd always been or the way they'd made him, had somehow ceased to matter. Where there had once been the gutless, comforting conviction that it wasn't his fault and that made everything all right, that nobody expected him to do any better, and he could shift all the blame and guilt onto something else- anything else- now there was nothing but a leaden, accusing ache rooted in his hard-light chest, and the thought of losing her-
-losing her for good, without even the hope he'd had up in space that she was alright somewhere, the unrealistic hope of seeing her again. Knowing she was gone and it was his fault for the things he didn't do, living the rest of his unimaginably long and pointless artificial life with this cold sick hollow ache freezing him from the heart out-
“I-”
He stopped.
“I could-”
He stopped again. His voice was a croak, faltering, rising at the edges like a question he didn't quite dare to ask.
“I could still-”
No I couldn't! yammered the voice, the big attention-getting one in the front of his head, bang on cue. I couldn't, I couldn't, terrible idea, it always goes wrong, and anyway, it's too late! Three strikes, remember? Three strikes and you're out! Even if I tried, it wouldn't change anything!
Very carefully, like someone trying to lay the last two cards on a ten-storey tower, Wheatley reached up and tugged the strip of paper from behind his tie-clip. He unfolded it, staring without seeing at the neat-drawn lines of roads and landmarks, the strings of numbers winding among the grubby creases, the ominous central red mark.
The third strike. The voice was right, absolutely right. She'd given him one more chance, and she hadn't been talking about mucking up the baking process or murdering a sheep-fence or even getting upset and accidentally comparing her to their worst enemy, she'd been talking about exactly this, just the simple, basic task of being a decent person. After everything she'd done for him, that was the only thing she'd asked in return, just to know he'd try, that he'd be behind her, no matter what.
Behind her, even if- just picking a wild, random example out of the air- even if he'd used up his last chance. Even if she'd given up on him, even if she didn't even want him there. Not to prove a point, not to prove anything, but because that was where a friend should be.
Oh, really? Alright then, Mr. Big Ideas, since we're being so inspired all of a sudden, exactly how am I supposed to get there, now? I can't! There's no way I can get there! Even if I ran the whole way, it'd take bloody hours!
“But-”
And even, even if I got all the way there, how am I going to get in? Knock on the front door and go, hello, express delivery, anyone order one Intelligence Dampening Sphere, slightly used, special offer on legs? It’s too late!
It probably was- Wheatley knew very well that a single day in There could last for a very, very long time. It could last for the rest of your life. It was probably too late already-
“But-”
Stop going but! It's no good going but! It’ll only get you in more trouble! It's a terrible idea!
He shut up, snapped his mouth into a dumb, downturned line. Right again, of course. That was what he was for, after all. That was why they'd made him who he was, and if any part of him had ever been capable of having good ideas, they'd deleted it.
Hadn't they?
[that's a]
[that's a positive on the cognitive rerouter]
No, he thought, and the thought came very slowly, crawling up through layers and layers of that old glassy, foggy confusion. No, they hadn't. Deleting a great big chunk out of the middle of something as basic as the ability to have an idea would have taken time, a lot of time. And they'd been in a bit of a hurry, hadn't they? They'd been- understandably- a little rushed, trying to come up with something on the hop to restrain the ever-multiplying artificial intelligence they'd accidentally given the power of a god and the temper of a wasp, and they'd really thought they were onto a winner with the whole make-a-useful-intelligence-dampening-personality-sphere-out-of-a-useless-employee project, so they'd just-
-done the next best thing. They'd written a neat little program, just for him, and they’d stuck it in his head, crammed it in on top of all the other blocks and modifiers and protocols they'd stuffed in there. They'd taken a mind already exceptionally gifted when it came to having stupid, bonkers, impractical, patently ludicrous ideas, and they'd isolated- not the part of it that had the ideas, but the part that thought they were good. They'd made that critically deluded little part of him strong enough to override everything else, made it so utterly set-in-stone convincing that it never even occurred to him to doubt it. They'd handed it the wheel of his psyche and wished it bon voyage. And it had performed brilliantly, popping up right on cue whenever he had one of his frequent, patented, Wheatley-brand terrible ideas, telling him it was brilliant, and-
-and-
-and whenever he had a good idea-
No! Nononono, don't think about that! Terrible, terrible idea, thinking about that, just- don't even bother, there is literally nothing to see in this whole area of- wait, what are you doing what are you doing stop it STOP-
Wheatley stood up.
Inside his head the voice was screaming in panic, and if he thought too hard about it he was pretty sure that he would start screaming too, but his knees unfolded obediently under him and he managed to pull himself up on the rough weldscarred metal at his back. He took a wobbly couple of steps in no particular direction, stopped, looked up.
The tower loomed above him, a ramshackle pyramid of many-coloured wires and mottled steel. He swallowed, fidgeting with the shred of paper in his hands, thought about the moment the previous day- a lifetime ago- when he'd climbed down from the giddy bright-buzzing heights and seen her looking back at him, that look, just for him-
The howling voice of the cognitive rerouter was still there, but he thought that it sounded just that little bit fainter, now. He almost caught himself feeling sorry for it, exposed at last, out of control for the first time since God-knew-when- but now an odd, galvanising feeling was beginning to ebb through him, getting stronger with every second he spent standing upright instead of curled up in his own little pity party (maximum number of guests: one, bring your own nibbles and self-loathing) at the foot of the tower. He wasn't sure, because he was still afraid to examine it too closely, and his mind was still blurry with fear for her and miserable, panicky regret, but he thought that somewhere in there-
-in some cowebby, disused circuit deep down where the light couldn't reach, somewhere down on the nano-level where components the size of cities glittered with bits of silicate dust and sparked connections that had been blocked off and deadened for decades-
-he just might be starting to have a good idea.
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Chell jogged up a shallow flight of metal steps. The corrugated mesh beneath her had been stamped with a pattern of round-and-oval holes that looked like a host of little gaping mouths, blurring under her feet as she ran.
She passed through a narrow corridor of scarred grey tiles and out into a larger antechamber. To her right, a tall bleached-white screen flickered and blinked into life, the lower section displaying a series of neat graphical symbols, information, warnings. The upper part, the part which should have shown her the chamber number- and the number of chambers still to go- had been left blank.
She ignored it.
The muted hum of the facility pressed in around her as she approached the chamber-lock, the cyclical door unlocking itself and hissing apart at her approach. She ducked through and out into a vast grey-white space, a flat-lit dull-buzzing chamber easily ten times the size of the largest building in Eaden.
“You're doing very well. If you perform well in this next test, I might even consider telling you how many chambers there are left to go before you reach the one where I'll decide whether or not to tell you how many chambers there are left to go.”
A trio of long red beams stretched the length of the chamber floor in an interlocking pattern. At a glance, Chell could see two high platforms, a scattering of cubes, a long gash in the floor, and a blocky, arched gape to the ceiling, like the vault of a cathedral built by a deranged architect only capable of thinking in ninety-degree angles.
“I should probably tell you that the strong sense of nostalgia you may be experiencing right now is a perfectly explicable part of the testing protocol. This chamber is based on the first one the moron sent us to after we made it up out of that shaft. Well, it uses the same basic structure, at least. I had to redesign most of the testing elements, so that it would actually present a challenge to someone with a functioning brain.”
Chell shot a violet-tinged portal into the ceiling, smacked another into the panels near her feet, dropped through onto the taller of the two high platforms, and booted the cube it held hard off the edge. It flew in a shallow arc and thunked into the floor, the lenses set into its sides rippling sharply on impact. They were made from an oily blue-green substance- mirrorlike, but not quite glass.
“That reminds me, where is the moron?” said the Voice, and the ersatz concern in it made her fists itch, the ragged ache rising behind her tight-locked teeth. “Oh. He let you down, didn't he? I told you he would. But you never listen to me.”
The first of the Thermal Discouragement Beams blazed into the refractive cube as she pushed it into its path, the baking heat sinking into her bare arms. She'd ripped the sleeves from her sweater halfway through the last chamber- she'd forgotten just how much of a liability loose, flammable fabric could be.
With a sizzling sputter, the redirected beam flicked off at an angle and struck a node on the far wall. Across the chamber, the floor moved, shifted, settled into a new configuration. She watched the new staircase adjust itself, the jointed arms beneath settling into position. The Voice echoed around her- sighing, martyrlike, heavy with resignation.
“One of these days you're going to realise that everything I've ever told you has been for your own good. You're going to feel really dumb...”
Chell crossed the floor, hurdling the lethal shin-high beams with long practice strides, skirting the deep pit at the centre. As she reached the steps, she closed her eyes for a long moment, tried to breathe, tried to focus.
Kept going.
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()~~~~~~~~ click for part 2/2~~~~~~~~()