Blue Sky - Chapter 14 - The Terrible Idea [1/3]
(Art by K! Also makes julienne fries!)
She was taunting her.
Of course, this in itself was nothing new. From the very first time Her jerky, constrained voice had echoed from the hidden speakers and told Chell in no uncertain terms that the device in her hands was worth more than she was, thinly-veiled insults had been pretty much par for the course, along with endless passive-aggressive digs about her unenviable situation and cracks at her self-esteem.
Fat- she knew damn well she wasn’t- stupid- the evidence suggested otherwise- adopted- she didn’t remember either way and wouldn’t have cared much even if she had- unlikeable- with no other humans around or even alive as far as she’d known, back then, she hadn’t given a damn if she was. That had always been the ridiculous thing about Her taunts, the thing which had always caused them to fall so far short of the mark. As aggravating as they were, it was as if they had been thought up to hurt someone living a normal life in a normal place, someone less worried about how to survive the lake full of acid in the next chamber than they were about how big their arse looked in their new jeans.
This was different.
Chell stared dully at the gaping hole in the chamber wall. It looked as if a couple of the jointed arms behind the panels had just given up the ghost mid-build- the panels themselves stuck out at ugly angles from the surface, forming an irregular hole. On the other side she could see a warren of stripped rebar walls, red-lit mesh, nooks and crannies full of bare wires and piles of scrap and scattered containers- a tantalising glimpse into the world behind the scenes.
The faulty arms fizzed and twitched, sparking gently, for all the world as if they had only just happened to malfunction a few moments before she’d flung through a portal on the angled wall opposite and landed, crouched and hard-breathing, on this very spot. It all looked very natural and accidental, and suspicious as hell.
Come on in, said the hole. Break the rules… if you dare.
Chell made herself turn away, walked slowly to the furthest point of the narrow ledge. This part of the chamber was barely ten feet across and easily two hundred feet high. It had taken her a long time to work her way up this far; her legs from the knees down ached dull grey murder and the half-healed place on her ribs had started to yell fresh outrage. She’d brought a single cube this far, dragged it up every single convoluted, trap-filled level of this towering chamber. Now, she set a tired foot against it, got ready to shove it off the edge of the thin walkway.
“Is there something wrong up there? Because if there is something wrong up there, I can’t see it. I guess I should have put a camera up there, because if there is something wrong up there, someone could just walk right out and I’d never even know.”
Another angled panel, another portal, another jaw-clenching run-up and swan-dive into empty space. She twisted as she fell, the cube turning end-over-end ahead of her, bringing her knees up sharply and tucking the portal device against her chest. She plunged level after level through a yawning column of dry, dead air, the blue-framed oval at the very bottom rushed up to meet her and- thht- the world twisted inside out and she staggered to a painful heels-first stop on the highest ledge. The cube bounced off the wall ahead, tumbled back to a standstill at her feet.
“Oh, remember just now when I said I couldn’t see what was going on? I lied. I can see everything in there. I’m still surprised you didn’t go for it, though. I would have thought that the kind of person who would happily choose to abandon their only friend to a hideous, fiery death would have no problem with leaving one hundred and fourteen innocent people to die just to save their own skin. But hey, it’s your decision. Maybe they owe you money.”
There was an exit-lock, a flat, floor-mounted button. Chell dumped the cube (paid for in full with one brain-bending timing puzzle and a dangerous skid through a slick of gel to reach the dispenser, costing her a painful assortment of bruises and half the skin off her left palm) and watched the neat track of cold blue dots flick to orange between the button and the exit. The cross symbol cycled to a tick, and the exit-lock slid open to reveal the rippling surface of an Emancipation Grid, and a waiting elevator beyond.
She felt a numb little flicker of satisfaction, and it chilled her. She was very afraid of that feeling. She knew that it belonged to the part of her that had shut down, the part that simply wasn’t able to handle the horror of what had happened, of what she was doing, the part that couldn't bear to be held in check like this, dragged back after four years of paradise and buried alive in this endless obstacle-course tomb with her friends’ lives held over her head like an executioner's blade. It had finally had enough, that exhausted, battered, broken part of her, it had thrown in the towel, and now it didn’t care about anything beyond that flick from blue to orange, the bright approving sound the exit made as it unlocked.
And it could spread. She was wearing out and she ached all over, and she wanted something- anything- else, anything that wasn't testing and the sick fear in her stomach and the haunting, hated Voice. Her control was breaking- still just about intact but critically compromised, as much as she kept trying to shove her fury and denial up against it like a barricade, it wasn't working, for the first time ever it wasn't enough. She would keep going no matter what but that fragile part of her that cared and hoped and hurt was the most precious thing she had left, and it was drowning.
“Thinking about it, you never even thanked me for giving you the cube back when you left,” mused the Voice, as the elevator slid to a halt and opened on a long, pale-panelled corridor, stretching out of sight. “That’s alright, though. I did realise it probably was a little cruel, leaving somebody all alone in a hostile environment with only a mute, heartless blunt object for company. I really felt bad about it for a while, but then I remembered; the cube doesn’t have feelings. So I'm sure it was fine.”
Chell felt the ball of helpless angry agony in the back of her throat swell, threatening to overwhelm her again. She stumbled to a halt, trying to fight it off. It wasn't Her- or it was, but it was a combination of everything, the stalemate terror that held her bound to this sick game with no foreseeable end in sight, the physical toll the tests were taking, the mocking, needling Voice, the buzzing silence of the facility, the miserable sense of total isolation. She'd been better off before, not knowing what else there could be.
“I can see their dreams, you know. Would you like me to tell you what they are dreaming about? None of them are dreaming about you. That's kind of sad when you think about it, but then again, they're just dreams. It's not as if they mean anything significant. You just can't have made that much of an impression. On any of them.”
She stood in the bleached, harsh-lit corridor, head down, her free hand spread against the wall, breathing in ragged, irregular gulps. She'd grown out of the habit of being completely alone. In Eaden she'd been happy to be by herself, most of the time, but there'd been other people there, always around her if she'd needed them to be.
And then he'd-
Chell knew that it was dangerous to even start thinking along these lines, that her determination was all she had left to stem the tide and that poking too hard at this injured, slow-bleeding part of her could easily break it for good, but she couldn't leave it alone. She couldn't believe that she had been so stupid, to make the same mistake, not just once, but twice.
She had to face it, to move past it if she could. He was an Aperture device, whatever he might once have been- just an ultimately faithless program with the appearance of humanity, a comforting bundle of lies cribbed from a luckless, long-gone employee. It would have been better if she'd been able to feel as genuinely angry with him as she had four years ago, when he'd turned around and stabbed her in the back at the moment of their shared success. This was worse, if anything could be worse, this weary heart-deadened disappointment, the numb realisation that she should never have expected any more of him. She'd known she shouldn't, but-
She'd wanted to. Having him there, all of a sudden, so sorry and afraid and struggling with touching desperation to understand, to be able to help him like her new friends had helped her- even to simply walk through the day followed by that wittering waterfall voice, it had felt so good, comfort she hadn't even been aware she'd been missing, and she'd been stupid, stupid enough to think that he actually-
Abruptly, she stopped and swallowed another painful breath, holding it, staring down along the length of her arm. Her first thought was that she was imagining things, that finally, her iron-steady grip on reality had started to slip under the pressure, but-
Very, very faintly, the panel beneath her hand began to tremble.
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“Wait actually no hang on hang on no no nononono-”
*
Dr. Thorsten Scheurmann, Auxiliary Head of E-Science and one of the brightest minds currently employed by the European Centre for Extraterrestrial Research, had been halfway through a sneaky on-duty brunch break when the alarms went off. He was therefore currently having the unenviable experience of trying to explain to his immediate superior why the central Enabling Grid for the entire European zone had suddenly been rendered unable to Enable a damn thing, while also trying to subtly pick bits of panic-ejected croissant off the front of his shirt. This wasn't doing anything for his confidence.
“What do you mean, twenty percent?” his supervisor was shouting. “How could we possibly be at twenty percent power? How could there possibly have been an unauthorised power drain of that size when there's nowhere for it to go?”
“I told you, I don't know, sir! One minute we were at full power, the next-”
*
“-nooohhhh god oh god ohgodohgodohhhhhnaaaaa-”
*
Somewhere in the panic-stricken early-morning command centre of White Forest Institute of Otherworld Technology, Professor Mellissa Stanfield banged a monitor which really didn't deserve it with the flat of her hand, and swore. It was hard to see, because the entire console room was plunged into the kind of emergency-lit darkness that made moving without a flashlight a brilliant way to end up with a wheelie-chair-related compound fracture.
“Well, where the hell's it coming from?”
“I don't know!” said the wide-eyed technician to her right. “Ass-end of nowhere, according to these readouts- yesterday we caught a few blips coming out of someplace in upper Michigan, but now-”
The door thumped back on its hinges, banging into the wall with a horrendous clatter and knocking over two chairs and someone's experimental zero-point rocket launcher, which, fortunately, wasn’t loaded.
“Professor Stanfield!”
“Oh, Jesus, now what?”
“It's- it's the Array! All forty-two antenna- they're- they're-”
“What, Morasky? On fire? Picking up the Xen Home Shopping Network? What?”
“They're moving on their own!”
*
“-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhHHHHHHHH-”
*
“Look, kiddo, I don't care what your little gadget's telling you, this is supposed to be the highest-grossing live broadcast this station has aired since the twenty-forties, stop gibbering and do something before our sponsors eat us alive!”
“I don't get it! It's like- it's like something's draining the power right out of our transmitter! We're trying to get some sense out of the satellites but they're all locked on some random string of coordinates- all we're getting is snow!”
“What, on every channel?”
“Well- we've still got- well, that is- we still seem to have- one-”
“Which one?”
“...Jazz, sir. Jazz FM.”
“Oh.... God.”
*
“-AAAAAAAAAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH-”
*
“-every channel-”
“-jammed-”
“-our network-”
“-the satellites-”
“-pulling it out of the system, where's it all going-”
“-north Michigan, can't get a fix on it, it's too-”
“-too-”
“-it's just too-”
“-damn-”
“-BIG-”
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The lights went out.
Chell stood quite still in the sudden darkness, conscious of the quiet, steady thrumming under her palm, the hum of the facility around her rising imperceptibly into a higher, more urgent key. The corridor around her felt like a black, bone-dry throat, the darkness like a tangible thing, pressing against her skin.
“Okay,” said the Voice, sharply. “I don't know what you just did, but I want you to know that I don't appreciate it.”
Chell started to feel, palm-over-palm, down the pitch-dark tunnel, slowly at first, and then with increasing urgency. Her night vision was excellent, but even her keen eyes couldn't function in these conditions, this complete absence of any kind of light at all. The pulse under her hands increased as she stumbled onwards, blind, pursued by Her hounding voice.
“You did something, didn't you? Actually, don't even bother answering that. Something is broken and you're within ten miles of it. It really doesn't take a genius with an immeasurable IQ to fill in the gaps. You do know I don't need to be able to see in order to run this facility, right? Light is a non-essential element of the testing process. It's a privilege, not a right. Do you know what else is a privilege? Oxygen.”
Chell stopped, dead. The pulse was now a high-pitched whine, digging into her eardrums like a toothpick, and she shook her head in helpless denial and pressed both hands against the slick invisible wall as if she could steady it, somehow stop whatever it was that was happening before it was too late-
“I gave you fair warning. I guess I need to show you that I'm not kidding around here. It’s a shame, really. You were doing so well that I was actually going to let half of them go after this next chamber, but since you seem to be incapable of following a simple set of reasonable rules, I'm just going to have to... let half of them go.”
I didn't do anything! Chell would have screamed it if she could, if she'd had any hope that the paranoid, angry Voice that was holding her friends' lives in the balance would believe her for a second, but she couldn't. Her throat was frozen, desert-dry, locked up tightly with her own bone-deep refusal to make a sound, to ever speak to Her, and now that she needed it, it simply refused to respond.
The floor was shaking too, now, shivering under her feet.
“Okay, that's it, I'm serious now,” said the Voice, and to Chell's amazement it sounded harried, worried, even a little afraid. “If you don't stop whatever it is you're doing down there a lot of your friends are going to be participating in a new test I've just designed to discover the most efficient method of inhaling deadly neurotoxin. You-”
“Incoming signal,” said a smooth, synthesised voice, from somewhere in the ceiling.
“Wait. Hold everything. What... what is that?”
“Triangulating.” Pause. “Subject acquired. Signal is of external origin.”
“Wait a seco-whoahwhoahWHOAHwhoahzztttt sschhhh whhuzzzzz-”
Chell hung on to the wall, shielding her face, coughing in the disturbed, dust-thick air. Red-lit gaps swayed and split in the walls and the floor, as the jointed arms shaping the structure of the corridor from the outside tried and failed to compensate for the crazy side-to-side seasick motion.
The corridor shook like a huge animal in the grip of a lethal fit. The whining, howling sound was still rising, louder and louder, until finally it gained shape and became a flanging, elated roar- a mad, jubilant war whoop of terror and euphoria.
“-AAAHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAAHAAAHAAAAAAAAH! YES! Yes! I did it I did it I'm here! I'm here! Ohhh man alive, talk about a rush-”
A sharp bright flare of hope hit Chell dead-centre in the struggling place behind her ribs, bittersweet, biting deep into her chest. It flooded through her before she could even attempt to hold it back, as if it was aware that it had been barred from the party ever since the moment when she'd first seen the monitor screens, and was set on making up for lost time. She pushed shakily off the still-wonky surface of the wall and stood upright, as Her extremely unimpressed Voice echoed around her in the blackness, flat with disbelief.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“Uhhh- nope! It's me! Surprise! Go on, admit it, you're surprised. No use denying it, 'cause you know what you are, love? Transparent. Ut-terly transparent. You're like a big glass window, into a great big empty room, full of thin air, and I can see right through it. Through you. That's how transparent you- hang on, what're you faffing around in the dark for? Fix that.”
“Reactivating Primary Refulgence Generator,” said the calm synthetic voice. A thick, zapping judder of a noise that seemed to pass through Chell's skull from one side to the other without involving her ears, and then the lights flickered back on, leaving her screwing up her eyes in the sudden harsh brightness.
The corridor now definitely looked as if it had seen better days, having gained a weird twisting off-axis tilt that hurt your eyes if you tried to follow it to the vanishing point. There was a thin scattering of silicon dust over everything, crunching underfoot.
“Hah!” barked Wheatley's voice, triumphantly. Like Hers usually was, like his had been, once- under radically different circumstances- it was huge, everywhere at once, echoing down the mangled corridor. “Cheers, nicely done. Right, Chell- where are you- oh! There you are, you're alright, you're alive! All in one piece, oh, that is- that is absolutely no-holds-barred one-hundred-and-ten-percent brilliant. Not- not, obviously, surprised, not much of a surprise that you're alright, given the head on your shoulders, but still, massive relief there. And- sorry. Again. I was- I just- well, no excuse, really, but, you know, here I am. Get back to that in a minute- priorities- should have made a list, really-”
“Listen, moron.” Each syllable sounded as if it had been carved from ice. “If you seriously think I'm going to let you put yourself back in control of my facility, you-”
“Hey, hey, whoah-whoah-whoah, keep your knickers on, who said anything about controlling your facility? Did I say I wanted to control your facility? No way, ha, nonono, that's aaall yours. Wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, if I'm honest. Not after that whole utter bloody shambles we ended up in last time, ohohoh, no, not if you paid me. Incidentally, that little corridor you've got her in down there, bit sort of stuffy, isn't it? Not exactly showing your full hand there, are you, in terms of interior design- ooh! I know! Why don't you give her a bit more breathing space?”
“What are you-”
Chell threw herself flat as the floor bucked like a startled horse, shielded her head against the raining dust and watched wide-eyed through the crook of her arm as the narrow walls and ceiling of the corridor shelled away in a domino-effect cascade of lunging, hydraulic chunks. The panel she was clinging to began to descend, slow and steady, through a space suddenly twenty times the size of the corridor it had been, tessellating neatly into existence in a flurry of mechanical motion. High grey-white walls, wide floor, a vaulted, echoing, airy chamber with a single gap that her panel slotted itself neatly into with a whirring cloc.
“Why did I do that?” Now She sounded downright bewildered. “I didn't want to do that at all. Why did I do that?”
Her Voice blurred, angry, baffled.
“What are you doing to me?”
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()~~~~~~~~ click for part 2/3~~~~~~~~()