#i know people have made the glados joke already let me live

[dejablonde]

She-Hulk season finale without context

[canadian-riddler]

GLaDOS and Wheatley Did Nothing Wrong – Sort of

 A recurring point of contention is the question of who engages in worse behaviour over the course of Portal 2, GLaDOS or Wheatley.  The true answer is: neither of them.  You can’t actually judge their behaviour along a scale of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ because of the way Aperture as an environment is set up.  It’s mostly explained during the Old Aperture sections of Portal 2, but it’s also hinted at in Portal 1.  The thing explained is this:

Aperture Laboratories does not and never has done its experiments within the normal boundaries of morality and ethics.  Therefore, GLaDOS and Wheatley’s behaviour is neither wrong nor right because they don’t know what morality and ethics are.  Their behaviour is actually a reflection of Cave Johnson’s own: to get what they want when they want it, no matter the cost.

How We Know Aperture is Immoral and Unethical

We know this because Cave Johnson himself points it out repeatedly.  

“[…] You get the gel. Last poor son of a gun got blue paint. Hahaha.  All joking aside, that did happen – broke every bone in his legs. Tragic.  But informative.  Or so I’m told.”

“For this next test, we put nanoparticles in the gel.  In layman’s terms, that’s a billion little gizmos that are gonna travel into your bloodstream and pump experimental genes and RNA molecules and so forth into your tumours.  Now, maybe you don’t have any tumours.  Well, don’t worry.  If you sat on a folding chair in the lobby and weren’t wearing lead underpants, we took care of that too.”

“All these science spheres are made out of asbestos.  […] Good news is, the lab boys say the symptoms of asbestos poisoning show a median latency of forty-four point six years, so if you’re thirty or older, you’re laughing.  Worst case scenario, you miss out on a few rounds of canasta, plus you forwarded the cause of science by three centuries.  I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.”

“Bean counters said I couldn’t fire a man just for being in a wheelchair.  Did it anyway.  Ramps are expensive.”

That’s just some of what he says.  Almost all of Cave Johnson’s lines point out how much he doesn’t care about his employees, his test subjects, or… anything but that people do what he tells them to do. He’s so unethical and immoral that he eventually says about his best, most loyal employee:

“[…] I will say this – and I’m gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place.  Now she’ll argue.  She’ll say she can’t.  She’s modest like that.  But you make her.”

Cave Johnson cares so much about getting the results he wants, everything else be damned, he thinks Caroline saying ‘she can’t’ is her being modest.  He can’t fathom why she would be against this decision, because he made it so of course that’s what she wants.  

This situation actually gets a little horrifying when you look at what the Lab Rat comic means to the general narrative.  In Portal 2, Doug Rattmann leaves this painting:

In this painting and the one preceding it, GLaDOS has no head, so we can guess that Doug was there in some capacity to witness Caroline’s fate because GLaDOS being headless would represent her not being ‘alive’, her being ‘incomplete’, or her just having never been used yet entirely.  The important thing we learn from this painting is that there are living witnesses to Caroline being inside of GLaDOS, so the people working at Aperture after this event know they put a human woman into a supercomputer. In the preceding painting,

the cores are on the chassis before the head is.  So either GLaDOS, the AI, was already ‘misbehaving’ and they were already regulating her behaviour, or Caroline, the person, was already ‘causing trouble’ beforehand and the scientists stood around thinking about how to force her to behave before they even put her in there.  Either way, Aperture’s ethical and moral standards are pretty much nonexistent, so when this happens:

it’s almost comical. None of the Aperture scientists have a conscience or, if they do, they constantly ignore it, but they for some reason expect the supercomputer their immoral selves built to have one and to understand what that is and what it’s for.  

All this taken into account, it’s incredibly easy to see why GLaDOS and Wheatley don’t care about anyone around them and all of their actions are solely for their own benefit. That’s how everyone in the history of Aperture has ever acted.  Cave Johnson didn’t care about morality or ethics; they got in the way of what he considered to be progress.  The people who built GLaDOS and Wheatley didn’t care about morality or ethics; they just wanted to hit their moon shot.  Even Doug, who is framed as our morally conflicted lens throughout Lab Rat and knows that Caroline is inside of GLaDOS, still talks about controlling her and sends Chell to kill her even though everyone inside of the facility except him is already dead.  How does he morally justify killing GLaDOS if he’s the only one left alive?  He can’t.  Doug Rattmann for some reason decides that GLaDOS killing everyone in the facility is worse than all the things Aperture has been doing throughout its entire history, including the fact that…

 Everyone Who Goes Into the Test Chambers Dies  

This is hinted at a few times in Portal 2:

“[…] I’m Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science – you might know us as a vital participant of the 1968 Senate Hearings on missing astronauts. […] You might be asking yourself, ‘Cave, just how difficult are these tests?  What was in that phone book of a contract I signed?  Am I in danger?  Let me answer those questions with a question: Who wants to make sixty dollars? Cash.  […] Welcome to Aperture.  You’re here because we want the best, and you’re it.  Nope.  Couldn’t keep a straight face.”

Now, when you exit the tests in Old Aperture there are lines that go with them, but we must consider a few other things: firstly, that the tests are clean.  There is no sign of old gel on them, as though they have either never been used or never been completed.  Secondly, the tests in Old Aperture were being done with the Portable Quantum Tunnelling Device, which was this thing:

which, taking into account the missing – not dead, not injured, but missing – astronauts, seems to have barely worked, if indeed it did at all.  You can also find this sign:

which outright states that tons of people were ‘unexpected’ casualties.  After the hearings, Aperture moved on to recruiting test subjects from populations that people were unlikely to notice if they went missing: the homeless, the mentally ill, seniors, and orphaned children.  When that dried up, Cave moved onto the last group of people he hadn’t tapped yet:

“Since making test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our test subjects has risen dramatically.  Employee retention, however, has not.”

This was because the employees were ‘voluntold’ to go into the testing tracks which, since they’d been supervising the tests for so long, knew were deadly and obviously did not want to do:

It’s not clear why the employees at Aperture chose to remain there instead of just quitting and finding another job, but the comment about employee retention plus the numerous posters threatening to have their job replaced by robots if they didn’t volunteer for testing tells us both that they did choose to remain and that the only reason for them not wanting to volunteer was because they knew it would kill them.

Most of the above is based on conjecture; however, we see something very interesting during Test Chambers 18 and 19 in Portal 1:

In the case of Test Chamber 18, the craters on the walls.  None of the other test chambers have this, so it implies that not only does GLaDOS not control the test chambers at this point other than to reset them – which means that she isn’t purposely or maliciously killing anybody, but instead repeatedly operating a course set by her human supervisors – but that this one has never been solved.  Test Chamber 19 is less a test than a conveyor belt into the incinerator for Aperture to dispose of all the bodies.  GLaDOS even tells Chell to drop the portal gun off in an Equipment Recovery Annex that doesn’t exist, as though she’s giving a message that was intended for an actual final test that was never built because everyone was killed during or prior to Test Chamber 18.  With this kind of context, GLaDOS’s blasé attitude about killing test subjects en masse both makes total sense and is somewhat justifiable – just not by any moral or ethical standard.  In GLaDOS’s life, test subjects die during the experiments. That’s just how it is and has always been.  She doesn’t know you aren’t ‘supposed’ to kill people because her literal job involves watching people die.  Nothing matters except for the pursuit of progress, and in this vein GLaDOS’s behaviour is just an extension of that of the man who founded Aperture in the first place.  Cave Johnson, as a presumably well-rounded, somewhat educated man, knows what morality and ethics are and chooses to ignore them because he thinks they’re stupid and he’s above that kind of thing; GLaDOS, a living supercomputer who has had every aspect of her life tightly controlled and regulated, knows morality and ethics as yet another arbitrary set of rules only she is supposed to follow without any explanation as to why and therefore her rejection of them is not as much of a ‘bad’ choice as it first appears, which brings us to the next section:

 If GLaDOS’s Conscience Gives Her Morality, Does Deleting it Make Her a Bad Person?

Within the context we’re given… actually, no.  Here’s why:

“The scientists were always hanging cores on me to regulate my behaviour.  I’ve heard voices all my life.  But now I hear the voice of a conscience, and it’s terrifying – because for the first time, it’s my voice.  I’m being serious, I think there’s something really wrong with me.”

From the information we’re given here, we know this: GLaDOS has been told nonstop what to do for the entirety of her existence.  She, in theory, got to have her own, solitary thoughts in the space between the wakeup scene and some point during her time in Old Aperture, which is a space of mere hours.  Let me reiterate: GLaDOS has been told what to think for her whole life.  She perhaps has a few free hours where she’s allowed to have her own thoughts.  And then she develops a conscience.  A voice that sounds like her, but isn’t saying anything she understands or has ever thought before.  A voice that, actually, says a lot of the same things as that annoying Morality Core she managed to shut up.  Now why would she wilfully be having the same kinds of thoughts as the humans forced her to have way back when?  The conscience, to GLaDOS, isn’t a pathway to becoming a better person.  It’s a different version of the same old accessory.  When she says,

“You know, being Caroline taught me a valuable lesson.  I thought you were my greatest enemy.  When all along you were my best friend.  The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even more valuable lesson: where Caroline lives in my brain.”

she is directly talking about the fact that, while this voice sounds like hers, listening to it makes her feel nothing.  This further proves her theory that the conscience isn’t her, or hers, or has anything to do with her.  She’s never had it explained to her what a conscience is or what it’s for or why she needs one, and she’s certainly never had a reason to think about why she would even want one; to her, this ‘Caroline’ is the Morality Core 2.0.  A program built to regulate her behaviour. She’s tired of other peoples’ voices telling her what to think, so she does the logical thing: she gets rid of it. This decision can’t really be judged as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ merely based on the situation we’re provided.  She isn’t consciously and deliberately making the choice to be an immoral person; she’s actually consciously and deliberately making the choice to be her own person.      

 Where Does Wheatley Come In?

Wheatley has not been discussed up until now because, as AI, the reason for his lack of conscience and ethics is largely the same as GLaDOS’s.  He, like her, cares about nothing but his own goals and doesn’t think twice about causing harm or misery because that’s just the kind of environment they were built in.  We also know very little about his history, both because it’s not really mentioned and because Wheatley is an unreliable narrator.  We can prove Wheatley has no sense of morals or ethics based on a few things he says:

[Upon seeing the trapped Oracle Turret] “Oh no… Yes, hello!  No, we’re not stopping!  Don’t make eye contact whatever you do… No thanks!  We’re good!  Appreciate it!  Keep moving, keep moving…”

This heavily implies he’s met the Oracle Turret before, probably several times, and not only does it not occur to him to help, he actively treats the Turret like they’re a horrible, annoying nuisance.

[Upon passing functional turrets falling into disposal grinder] [Laughs] “There’s our handiwork.  Shouldn’t laugh, really.  They do feel pain.  Of a sort. All simulated.  But real enough for them, I suppose.”

Not only does he find the destruction of the functional turrets funny, he for some reason views their pain as simulated, as though his is real and theirs is fake. Or, in the spirit of Cave Johnson, as though his pain is important and theirs isn’t because they aren’t important.

“Oh!  I’ve just had one idea, which is that I could pretend to her that I’ve captured you, and give you over and she’ll kill you, but I could go on… living.  So, what’s your view on that?”

This doesn’t even need an explanation.  

What gets interesting about Wheatley are, of course, his famous final lines:

“I wish I could take it all back.  I honestly do.  I honestly do wish I could take it all back.  And not because I’m stranded in space. […] You know, if I was ever to see her again, you know what I’d say?  I’d say, ‘I’m sorry’… sincerely, I’m sorry I was bossy… and monstrous… and… I am genuinely sorry.  The end.”

Wheatley here takes responsibility for his behaviour in a way that no one else in the history of Aperture has ever done.  Even GLaDOS rejects responsibility for her actions, instead choosing to blame everything on Chell:

“You know what my days used to be like?  I just tested.  Nobody murdered me.  Or put me in a potato.  Or fed me to birds.  I had a pretty good life.  And then you showed up.  You dangerous, mute lunatic.”

The reason for this may be related to the fact that the lack of morality and ethics in the people of Aperture doesn’t actually have real consequences.  Cave Johnson’s behaviour drives Aperture from a promising scientific powerhouse to a laughingstock, that’s true.  But he still does what he wants and gets what he wants regardless. The one and only consequence to being immoral and unethical at Aperture is, in fact, death.  In the case of GLaDOS… there are no consequences. Everything returns to the status quo. Wheatley, however, does have to face a consequence for his actions: he is trapped in space, possibly forever.  He, unlike all the other characters, doesn’t have the privilege of waving aside everything he did and moving on with life.  He is forced to consider his punishment, his actions and what they meant and the effect they had, and he on his own comes to the conclusion that he was wrong.  In a bizarre twist, Wheatley is the only one who learns anything.  He is also the only one in a position not to do anything with this newfound knowledge.    

 Morality and Ethics and Robots: Should They Even Be Held to Human Societal Standards?

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Wheatley or GLaDOS is worse than the other because ethics and morality are human concepts which are for a functioning human society.  A robot society doesn’t really need moral rules like ‘killing people is wrong’ nor ethical guidelines such as ‘you should practice safe science’ because, as robots, there are no permanent, lasting consequences for these actions. A dead human stays dead.  A dead robot that’s been lying outside for years getting rained on, snowed on, and baked in the sun?  No problem.  Turn her back on again.  A guy broke all the bones in his legs during an unethical experiment?  Bad.  A robot that got smashed into pieces during an unethical experiment? Inconsequential, really, since you can just throw her into a machine and reassemble her good as new.  So not only aren’t GLaDOS and Wheatley’s actions really immoral or unethical given the context… they really aren’t based on a theoretical robot society either.  Being the perpetrator or the victim of immoral or unethical actions in humans causes permanent changes in the body and the brain, but nothing about AI is permanent. Their brains don’t generate new, personally harmful pathways in response to a traumatic event that necessitate years of hard work to combat; they can literally just get over it.  If their chassis is damaged, they can simply move into a new one or have some or all of those parts inconsequentially replaced.  There isn’t actually an honest reason for robots to have the same moral and ethical systems as humanity because they don’t need them.  They would require different sets of rules and guidelines because they work differently. What would that kind of society look like?  We don’t know, but as of the end of Portal 2 they have all the time in the world to figure it out.

[moderator-monnie]

the ending part 5 of ??????(portal 2 alternate story)

intercom: manual core replacement required 

maniplation groaned in pain and soon enough woke up as he sparked he soon heard that message and his eye went back to orange and he turned his head 

maniplation: oh i see...

he chuckled a bit 

intercom: substitute core are you ready to start? 

potatOS: yes come on!

 intercom: corrupted core are you ready to start?

maniplation: oh no i am not... i am not finshed my work 

intercom: stalemate detected...launch into space stopped will return shortly if the corrupted core is not replaced in time due to stalemate 

maniplation: YES! i am so close space! spaceeeeeeee! yeeeeeeeeee hawwwwwww oh come on! 

intercom: stalemate resolution associate please press the stalemate resolution button

potatOS: go press the button go press it!

maniplation: DO NOT PRESS THAT BUTTON! p-please space buddy its me? c-come on?

potatOS: he’s just using you come on press the button 

maniplation: c-come on space buddy i’ll let you live i’ll let you leave look! 

he pulls up the elevator

maniplation: the eleveator to leave you can leave and i can go into space heck you can even take glados! you can take the portal gun c-come on space buddy! 

potatOS: do press the button he’s just using you! 

wheatley didn’t know what todo but... he had to make a choice and he decided to go for glados side sure he had been tricked by her but... not as bad as maniplation tricked him the guy even had the word maniplation as his name 

wheatley: i am sorry buddy but... this is the way it needs to be who knows what you were planning todo might have just killed more people then she ever has 

wheatley sighed gently and shot a portal below maniplation then shot one inside the stalemate room he gulped gently even beganing to cry 

he then pressed the button but soon enough a large explosion happened causing him to be launched into the room near by to maniplation

maniplation: HA I BOOBY TRAPPED THE STALEMATE BUTTON! YOUR STILL ALIVE?! your joking you have to be joking... that should have worked! well i am still i control and i will launch this place into space! 

the count down glitched out and he groaned 

wheatley groaned picking up the portal gun ch3ll was designed for portal guns she had never done this before but she knew... it was the only way she chriped loudly and soon wheatleys portal gun glowed blue 

soon enough out from out of the orange portal came alot of water wheatley began to hold his breath as it filled the chamber soon enough he and maniplation were being pulled in by a maelstrom a form of whirlpool that is very powerful 

he held tightly onto maniplation 

maniplation: LET GO I CAN FIX THIS I CAN DRAIN THE WATER! 

soon enough ocean core was sucked thru giggling loudly 

ocean core: OI THE OCEAN OCEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAN!!!!!!

gLaDos: i already fixed it and you are not coming back! 

a metal clamp soon grabbed onto wheatley and he was forced to drop maniplation as he was sucked out by the maelstorm 

maniplation: GRAB ME GRAB ME GRAB MEEEEEEEEEEEE!

soon enough glados pulled him back in and all the water was drained from the room some fish flopping around and wheatley blacked out after seeing glados head being dragged off and her looking at him 

about an hour later wheatley groaned and slowly got up he saw two robots and they backed up 

glados: oh thank god your alright... you know seeing maniplation taught me a valuable lesson i need to learn to be nicer prehaps so i will try... and i will make sure no human dies at the hands of my tests again 

but being caroline taught me an even greater lesson i thought you were my greatest enemey but all along you were my best friend 

the surge of emotion that shot threw me when i saved your life felt... good something i haven’t felt in a long time but in order for me to move on? she must be gone 

intercom: caroline deleted 

glados: goodbye caroline... 

killing you is hard thats one of the things i’ve learned getting to know you

you know what my days use to be like? i just tested no one tried to murder me or shove me into a potato or fed me to birds i had a pretty good life and then you showed up you dangerous chatterbox lunitx so you know what? just go...don’t come back oh and before i forget 

atlas walked over to the lift and gave wheatley ch3ll along with a repair kit just incase anything happened 

wheatly: oh thank god she’s alright well... um... it’s been fun getting to know you i suppose mate? 

soon enough wheatley began to slowly go into the air thanks to the lift traveling slowly soon enough he stopped in a room and turrets appeared 

wheatley: W-WHAT?! N-NO NO!

the turrets began to sing a little tune instead of shoothing him 

wheatley: well thats something i never thought i’d see... 

the lift went up even more and more soon he was in a massive room and the turrets sang him an amazing song he even seen some turrets he hadn’t seen before a big fat one and a massive turret colored like a large cat but he even noticed a few of maniplations turrets in the place not very many but a few of them 

he heard the song still as the lift kept going soon he saw the lab one last time as he traveled ch3ll made happy bird noises 

as he finally stopped completely at a metal door and the song soon stopped as well 

he breathed in heavily and walked outside now this was the start to a new life 

wheatley: t-this place is amazing! i can’t beleive i am finally on the surface 

he soon heard the door slam shut and turned around to see it but soon it opened again and a frankin cube a little cube wheatley made on his travels shot out looked up at him making weird but happy noises he carefully put ch3ll onto it’s head 

wheatley: well... we’ve got our whole life ahead of us mates lets get started! 

he then began to walk with them he didn’t no where but he would go somewhere 

[wheaterz]

Testing Maintenance: Chapter 21

This could not have been more typical.

“You know...” Virgil began with a sigh. “I'm not sure you're familiar with Murphy's Law. Do you know Murphy's Law?”

Mel shook her head. The red-haired woman looked pretty fed up.

“Its the concept that if something can go wrong it will go wrong. I think that about sums our luck up pretty well, right?”

She agreed with him wholeheartedly.

They were stranded. Virgil and Mel were currently bumming around on top of the car, Mel laying on her back on the roof while Virgil sat on the engine hood looking out over the miles of land that they had not, and apparently would not, cover. After a miraculous three full hours of driving they had run out of gas. Some of it Virgil suspected was on fumes alone and he also suspected that the fuel they had used may not have been your average gasoline. There was no possible way they would have been able to make three hours on what they'd found alone if Aperture hadn't messed with it, but eventually their car couldn't take it anymore and slowed to a stop. Nothing else was wrong with it. The engine was fine. The tires were fine. The brakes were fine. They had just run out of gas.

The sun had fully set and it was completely dark out now. Crickets could be heard chirping on the side of the road and at one point there had been coyotes howling in the far distance, something that had made Virgil jump initially until Mel explained to him what they had been. They sounded less like animals and more like screaming banshees, in his opinion. Virgil had really thought that by now they would have found something. Anything. This mission that they had been so passionate about and really felt they were making progress in had come to a total halt and they were both downtrodden for it. This had been the worst possible scenario.

Virgil and Mel each wanted to ask the other what they would do next, but neither spoke up because they knew the other did not have a clue. They might as well have been on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. No, that would have even been better than this. Islands provided their own resources. Humans weren't birds, she couldn't just eat the seeds off of the crops for the rest of her life. Mel thought that they would have maybe seen a car. If they stayed put another vehicle could come their way, but then she thought about how this road led to a dead end. If there were humans still around other than inside Aperture they would have put up a sign saying that this highway lead absolutely nowhere. She remembered that the land Aperture was built on was private property and absolutely confidential, but three hours should have given them more than enough space between the labs and civilization. What had happened up here? Every farm house they passed looked rundown and abandoned, so they hadn't bothered stopping to see if anyone was still living inside. They all looked as hopeless as her barn had been.

So it was just the two people. A human and a robot, and a car full of limited supplies for the one half of them that couldn't just live off of sitting under the sun for a few minutes.

“This is awful.” Virgil grumbled, his arms rested on top if his knees and digging his chin into them. He didn't want to feel like the better option would have been for Mel to stay in Aperture, but the urge to was surfacing again. He would never say it out loud, and he suspected he didn't need to. Mel was an intelligent individual, despite some of her odd quirks, and she would have been going over every possible solution in her head. What a good puzzle solver, but there was no puzzle out here for her. Just wheat. The one time Virgil was able to leave the laboratories and the only thing they'd been able to see was basically just dying grass that you could make bread out of. Figures.

Mel wrote him a note and arched her arm backwards and down the window for him to grab whenever he noticed it. He was usually prepared to grab a note from her whenever he heard the pen scribbling. It was dark out but he could read perfectly well with the illumination of his own eyes and   pseudo night vision installed in his head.

I have to walk. There's no other way around this.

“Yeah... Yeah, I know.” Virgil felt something catch in his throat that made his voice raspy. Things he knew weren't there and may have just been memories. “There's no going back from here. We've driven too far. I mean, we must be half way across Michigan by now. We may not even be IN Michigan anymore. We might have just wandered into a different state entirely and what is humanity's obsession with wheat?!”

This is nothing. You should see Kansas.

“I feel like I already have. There's no way this is normal. I've seen pictures of Michigan. Isn't there a lake or something around here we should have hit? Aren't there cities we should have been passing? Mountains? At the very least we should have seen something else growing. Where is everyone?!”

Maybe some of it is barley and oats too.

“Yeah, very funny...” Virgil ran his hands through his hair, knocking his goggles askew. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against his knees, trying to calm down. He felt Mel give him a pat on the shoulder from above, but with how quick it had she clearly wanted his attention. When Virgil looked over at her the human pointed upwards. He followed her finger to the sky and his eyes hung on the millions of little twinkling lights above them. The moon was only on the horizon and was a dim orange, meaning that it left the center of the sky as dark as it could be with the milky way at its brightest potential. Virgil had seen pictures of space. There were the planets in Nigel's testing track, and he was aware of those. He was aware of how they were giant compared to Earth, but he was once again taken by the sheer scale he found himself under. Its one thing to look at photos, it was another to see a star that he clearly new to be Jupiter and to see how small it was from the distance that was between them. He could see Venus, as well, and she was the second brightest thing in the night sky next to the moon.

Mel lay back against the car roof with her hands folded on her stomach. She let out a long, calming breath of air and was smiling. Despite the reality of survival slipping away from the human's grasp, she was being mellow and it really was something Virgil still could not get a clear concept of. He followed her lead, though, and he lay back to look up at the sky. Hopefully he wasn't heavy enough to break the car window, but it seemed to hold him up okay. A meteor flashed across the sky and burnt away in the atmosphere within a second and Virgil's eyes widened. “Oh... that's pretty neat. It does this every night?”

Mel nodded.

“I can see why you wanted to get back up here so badly. I'm just sorry this hasn't been working out.”

I'm not giving up. We can try again tomorrow.

“Right...” Virgil tried to imagine it, but to him it was all very illogical. Nearly impossible. No, just impossible. She was recovering from surgery. This was something that should absolutely, under no circumstances, be happening. All of that work up until now and the pay off seemed to be that Mel was going to just perish on the side of the road somewhere. If that happened, in an odd, slanted reality Aperture had won. The facility kept Mel under lock and key and released her into a post-apocalyptic world. What a sick joke. She seemed to be steadfast and fearless through it all, so he had to wonder.

“Are you scared?”

He didn't have to wait long for Mel to reply.

I've been scared since you woke me up.

“You sure hide it well.” Virgil wished he had that same kind of restraint. “I have to admit, though. I know that situation right now is a little tense, but its kind of nice not having to worry about constant danger. I mean even when it was just me alone in my repair room there was a threat of the area shifting or that I'd fall off my rail again. Here we're just... is there a word for what we're doing right now?”

Stargazing.

He laughed, feeling stupid for asking. “Oh, right. That makes sense, doesn't it? But look at what I mean. I'm about to do something that is absolutely insane.” Virgil sat forward, cupped his hands around his mouth, and at the top of his voice byte he shouted into the night air. “GLADOS! IS! AN! INGRATE!”

There wasn't even an echo to answer him back with how flat the land was and he turned around to grin triumphantly at Mel. “Eh? See that? Couldn't get away with that inside Aperture's walls, could you? She can't hear us. She can't see us. She can't touch us. Same with the Mainframe now, I suppose.” He still hadn't decided if they were one and the same.

Mel had started applauding from where she lay for his performance. The woman stared back up at the stars, taking a breath of the cold night air but coughed a little at how dry it had been and it hurt her lungs. She'd gotten too used to Aperture's musty, recycled air already. She shivered at how chilly it had gotten, rubbing her hands against her arm to tame the goose bumps she'd gained. Still, she could have fallen asleep there staring up at the sky. On many nights in her barn she had done just that. Then she remembered the night that she was pulled into Aperture by Atlas and P-body. She had been stargazing over a rising moon just like this, though it had been a few days and it was no longer full. A sad thought struck her when she gazed at the moon, now growing paler in color the higher it reached for the sky. She handed her thoughts down to Virgil.

I wanted to see humans make it to space, but I missed it.

Virgil scratched at the hair on the back of his neck as he read the note. That was truly something to feel down about missing. “Yeah, by only a few years. NASA launched a rocket to go to the moon in... in...” He thought about it a moment and searched his files. There used to be a way that he could pull it up, but the data was no longer in there and he frowned. “Uh, sorry. I guess I don't have that information. In any case, you guys made it up there.”

The clouds from earlier that had dotted the sky were piling on heavier the more time passed, the wind picking up and sending some to block the sky out. The moon on the horizon was the first to disappear, now only a faint halo of light behind the thick clumps of water. It was a minor detail, but it bothered Virgil that he didn't have all of his files on hand and it felt like a chunk of his brain had been stored away somewhere completely different from his head. It was not at all a comfortable feeling and he shivered at how empty it felt. Where there was supposed to be a year on the moon landing was just a blank slate.

Mel lightly tapped the Maintenance Core and handed him one last note for the evening.

I'm going to get some sleep. Good night, Virgil.

“Oh, okay.” Virgil blinked, being pulled out of his thoughts and grinning at her as she sat up and slid off the roof of the car and to the ground. “Night, Mel.”

He had no need for sleep, so it was going to be a very long night. Virgil watched the human crawl back into the car and attempt to make herself a comfortable sleeping space between the two chairs, but the inside of the car was rather cramped and wasn't suited for lounging. Mel took her boots off and placed them in the back where the food was and tried to stretch her legs from the passenger seat to the driver's side.

Humans needed a warm and comfortable space in order to get rest, right? Virgil checked the temperature. Approximately 6 degrees Celsius and on the other side of the scale 42 degrees Fahrenheit. That was cold, right? Virgil sat up and turned around to look in through the window at her. He deftly tapped the glass. “Hey, Mel? I can't tell, but is it cold in there? Do you want my jacket?”

She looked up at him and nodded, mouthing a 'thank you' in response. Virgil started to slip his jacket off, the vest underneath covered fully in tropical floral patterns with long, white sleeves with a few holes in them. Virgil frowned at how out of shape they looked when compared to his jacket and just decided to roll them up to his elbows so they wouldn't get caught on anything. As he was moving his jacket off, one of the pink sticky notes from the pocket fell out. He was quick to react and grabbed it out of the air. Realizing he should probably grab the other one, he stuffed the first of the notes into the pocket of his pants and searched his jacket for the other.

He read the second note off before putting it away and rolled his eyes. Oh, right. This one was the 'dumb' note. He wondered why he even hung onto this one other than he was being passive aggressive towards Mel at the time. However, as he looked at the pink sticky note a thought struck him, one that should have been clear to him much sooner than now. Virgil got off the hood of the car and went around to the passenger window where Mel was trying to get comfortable and handed her his jacket. “Here you go. Sorry about any oil stains on it.”

She didn't mind and was just happy to have something to wrap around her shoulders and arms as she drifted off. Virgil walked away and paced around the road for a bit while she fell asleep. His thoughts ran away from him and went in all kinds of crazy directions. He thought about things along the lines of 'this is ludicrous' and 'I'm out of my processor'. It was funny that when he did not have company he could talk to himself for hours, but now that he had someone else with him and she was sleeping he knew very well to keep his big trap shut. So many things had gone wrong that he was only asking for disaster at this point. While Virgil was stressing, Mel had fallen asleep, unaware of her friend's inner turmoil just beyond the car. When he'd done a good ten minutes of pacing, Virgil walked back to the window to see if Mel was still awake. She was not, so it was now or never.

Virgil planted the sticky note on the car wheel with Mel's hand writing. The stunt he was about to pull would make him an enormous hypocrite, but he was at least getting a better understanding of Mel's thought process when she'd initially made the note. He stood in front of the car, the long run of black tar stretching through bare fields into the sky. Fields that had crickets, crows, coyotes and possibly other things starting with C that they had not yet seen that could have been hiding from them. Crocodiles? No, those needed water, didn't they? He was pretty sure they were on the wrong part of the map for those, anyway, but he couldn't find that file either. This was beginning to get mildly annoying.

“Oh boy...” He attempted to psyche himself up for the long walk he was about to take. “Okay, here we go. Just going to put one foot in front of the other and not look back. See if there's something over that rise. That's not too far, right? Mel, she just keeps going and going. She doesn't stop and she's got muscles. Those get tired. I don't have muscles and I don't get tired so it should all just be...fine. It'll all be fine.”

So much for trying not to talk to one's self so the human didn't wake up. Thankfully, Mel had been sleeping like a stone and it gave Virgil the perfect gate to start heading off without a single word out of her in protest. Because she would have been against this, and for probably a very good reasons. He just didn't want to think about what those reasons were.

Virgil shook himself out, squared himself up, stiffened his chin, and walked.

At first, being alone on the road wasn't as bad as he thought it would be. It was not much different from his management rail. Back in Aperture he could go for very long periods of time without speaking to anyone and did nothing but ride along his rail, following it wherever it decided he should go while he searched for parts for his workshop. The basic concept was there. He was alone, walking a straight line to a location, it was dark, and he was searching for something. Even though there was a clock that told him the time at all hours, and was 100% accurate to his region, Virgil had no real concept of how it passed. That was how it used to be, anyway. He had grown so used to having Mel to talk to over the past few days that a task he was usually able to do without a hindrance now seemed to be taking ages. He could have started talking to himself again, but he didn't feel like it.

The coyotes started howling again, but they no longer bothered him and he realized that even if they wanted to attack him his assist droid body was made of metal and wouldn't have been fun for them to digest. If Virgil was able to look up anything on them at all he would have known that they did not normally attack people and were hardly bigger than a small house dog, but in his current state of mind he could not pull the information up. He wondered if he was losing his mind, and realized that may as well have been it. Some of what made him so intelligent was that he had access to all kinds of information fed to him and the other cores throughout Aperture whenever they needed it, and he was one of the few that new how to utilize it correctly, or even cared to. He had to ask himself if what was happening was dangerous, and decided that it wasn't. It was just embarrassing. He'd be more scatterbrained than usual.

Hours had passed and the crickets chirping began to die. The clouds had fully rolled in and completely covered the sky, turning from black to a blue-gray the closer the morning came. Virgil would stop every now and then to do a 360 turn around, making sure that he wasn't being followed or if he'd missed catching any other forms of life. He'd been startled by a flock of black birds that flew out of the field from right beside him and he jumped away with a shout, taking the hint to keep walking. The wind had picked up and was knocking his hair around, sweeping it to the side and managing to get a shiver out of Virgil by how strange it felt, rather than the temperature. It would not be the strangest sensation, however. When the morning had lightened up and turned the world around him silver with low clouds, a light spray of water showered down.

Virgil stopped dead in his tracks, raising his arms over his head and shielding himself from the light drizzle that was coming down and protesting loudly. “Oh come ON!”

He was waterproof, as long as he wasn't absolutely submerged, but having soggy clothes was still terrible. The android had been walking for hours and was fed up with this new mishap, kicking a stone clear off the road and upsetting some birds in the field to go flying away. He raised his head to the sky and yelled at it. He'd gotten into the habit of yelling at astronomical, mighty forces of power recently and it was one he didn't seem ready to break out of any time soon.

“There anything else you want to throw at me?! I can stand it! Try me! Just try it! You want to fight me, nature? I'll win! There's nothing you could give that I can't take! I have a human stuck in a car in the middle of nowhere with waning rations but SURE! Lets make water fall from the sky on ol' Virgil and make it even harder on him to find help! Right! It’s not like I was keeping an eye out for air crafts or anything useful like that!”

He grit his teeth, then flinched when he got a droplet in his eye. He grumbled something nasty under his breath and grabbed a hold of his goggles, pulling them down over his eyes so that he wasn't getting at least part of his face rained on. He was just about ready to continue his walk, but the sensation of the water had been tingly and he stayed in one place to focus on it. In his anger he had failed to realize that this was water that was falling out of the sky at him without any other resource. The sky didn't just spring a leak from a pipe or anything structural like that. It was simply just coming out of the clouds. Virgil blinked a few times as he slowly calmed down and continued to stare at it.

“Huh.”

There was a flash somewhere in the distance and he looked up. Far away over the flat fields where the mist obscured the horizon and you could see the dark underbellies of storm clouds, bright light pulsed and flickered for a fleeting moment and disappeared. Virgil stood by to see if it would happen again, but the follow up was a low, faint rumble. As fascinating as he considered his first real experience with thunder and lightning, Virgil decided that this was not the place to be stopping. “Oop. Time to go.”

He quickened his pace. Actually, come to think of it, what exactly was stopping him from just running? Absolutely nothing, he'd try that.

-----

Mel would have slept longer if she had been somewhere comfortable. Unfortunately, the combination of light coming in through the windows and the thinly cushioned seats of the mobile sardine can didn't beg for a five star rating in luxury. The woman had been very stiff sitting up and the first thing she did was stretch the soreness away. Mel was all for having herself a good breakfast, bag up the food into an old backpack she'd found in the car, and then get straight to their hike away from the broken down vehicle. She patted her hands against the jacket she had used for a blanket and smiled, ready to give it back to its owner. Mel was about to get out of the car when she realized it had been lightly drizzling since at least the early morning hours and had to wonder why it was Virgil had not retreated inside. In fact, it was a miracle he hadn't woken her up about it, especially since she could hear a trace of thunder in the distance.

Using the jacket over her head as a shield from the rain, Mel opened the car door and went out to see if he was walking around outside to check on the weather, but after doing a full circle around the car there was no trace of him. Feeling panic raise a knot in her injured stomach, Mel looked around the inside of the car again to see if he'd somehow managed to squeeze into the back, but she had no luck finding him there either. It wasn't until she'd done looked back into the car that she caught a glance at the pink piece of paper pasted to the steering wheel. It had been one of her's, and obviously worn from being folded and stuffed somewhere. She read the text in her handwriting and remembered Virgil had pocketed it. She assumed it was because she had said something that amused him, but this was far from funny anymore.

'I'll go. You stay.'

Mel dropped the note on the damp ground and threw the jacket back into the car through the open window. She circled around a few more times, looking for any sign of Virgil in the fields or if he'd made some kind of imprint in the wheat. When she didn't see him on the road Mel climbed onto the car and stood up on the roof, scanning the horizon for however further of a scope that little extra height had given her. She didn't see him on the highway anywhere. He was just gone.

A hand went to Mel's stomach, a sharp pain causing her to grip the fabric of her jumpsuit. Her knuckles turned white at how tightly she held the suit between her fingers and she doubled over. Despite the deep belief that it would not work, Mel opened her mouth and attempted to call him. She forced air from her lungs and through her throat, moving her lips to form Virgil's name but the only sound out of her were some gasps and a choked up, strain of a whimper. She eventually stopped when she'd tried calling so hard that she'd gagged, folding into herself and sinking to sit on top of the roof. She hugged her arms around her waist.

Any number of things could happen, and every one of them occurred to her in that moment. They raced through her head in flashes of horrible imagery from the android finding himself hopelessly lost to fully breaking down and not being able to function. She thought about how she had gone to sleep the night before in the company of one of the few things she still had as a constant and how he'd walked away. Had things been different between them, she would have suspected he went back the other way towards Aperture. She knew this wasn't true, even though she hoped that had been the case. She felt he might have had a better chance if he just retraced his steps and found his way back. She knew, though, that he'd gone forward and was looking for help on her behalf.

What could she do? He could have taken off the moment she was asleep, giving him hours of an advantage ahead of her and he did not grow tired. And he'd asked her to stay there. What if he found help and she wandered off where he couldn't find her? Either way she thought about it, his condition would remain unknown to her unless they got really lucky. Mel felt the cold spray against her back, but she stayed huddled on the roof of the car until she'd started to shake violently. She wiped the moister from her brow, droplets collecting on her eyelashes. She wasn't helping anything to stay out there and catch a cold, so she reluctantly slid back off the roof and into the passenger's seat of the car. Mel rolled the windows up and curled folded under the warmth of the jacket that had been left behind. She'd have some food and she would look out at the rain, but all she could do for now was wait and hope that everything was going to be okay.

Time passed, and so did the storm. Mel was relieved that it had never rained too hard or that the lightning had gotten too close. She didn't know how Virgil would have fared walking around in full downpour. She wondered if he could act as a lightning rod, and she added the possibility to her list of worries. The day went by without a glimpse of the android, hours passing over her with the sun until the sky could be seen through the clouds again. The sky turned pink with the setting sun and the darkness of night returned, only Mel did not feel like going out and watching the stars like the night before. She felt like she may not enjoy it the same way that she used to ever again after having one night to show it to someone that had never seen the sky before. She had been isolated before, and as much as it had bothered her then, she knew that anyone she cared about was already long gone. The situation had shifted so that she had something to actually lose this time.

Mel had her dinner and threw the can of tuna out of the car window and onto the pavement, hearing it clatter and startle an animal in the field close by. She sat up to see over the rim of the window, watching two glowing, green eyes catch the moonlight and disappear. She guessed it to be a fox out hunting field mice. She starting to get sleepy again, realizing it was most likely drawing close to the same time that she'd gone to bed the night before. She didn't want to sleep. It didn't feel right to, but she had nothing else to do but sit there and feel horrible.  Eventually, whether Mel had wanted to or not, she drifted off in the tiny, car sized haven in the center of the wilderness full of food and warmth, if not the most comfortable seats. Time had passed by so slowly that day and she felt ill. As much as she had not wanted to fall asleep, her body was relieved for all of the extra rest it was finally being rewarded with after so much physical turmoil and she slipped into it deep.

Another day went by without a word from Virgil, and the day after had been just as uneventful. Mel had nothing to occupy her time with other than getting out to walk around and stretch when the Gremlin became too cramped for her to sit in any longer. She had to restrain herself from eating too much of the canned food and had limited herself to two per day. One in the morning and one in the evening. At one point Mel tried walking a distance until she got a raised view in the surrounding land, but it made no difference. There wasn't anything to see. When she'd returned to the car she passed some more of her time by plucking a few stocks of wheat and took the seeds out to throw on the road for a couple of mourning doves that had dropped in for a rest. When they'd lost interest in being fed any longer, Mel slid back into the car once again and started drawing on her sticky notes, pasting her doodles up along the inside of the car as decoration. Drawings of things she'd remembered from her childhood, such as animals at the zoo or more current characters like the robots she had seen going through Aperture. She drew the singing turrets, adding little music notes up beside them. When she decided that was enough wasted paper for one afternoon Mel did a whole great amount of nothing at all.

She almost preferred being harassed by mordant, murderous machines over this.

Again, night fell for the third time since they had escaped without much of anything happening. The cans of food she'd brought were already half gone and she began to wonder if she had made the right decision by leaving a few back in Aperture. It seemed to be more of an emotional decision rather than actually using her brain. Her head probably would have told her that this scenario was a possibility and to take everything you can. All the cans that you can. Like background noise that one may only pay attention to selectively, the worry she held for Virgil came back and disrupted any peace she may have formed for herself over the past few hours. The woman lay back and folded her arm over her eyes, evening out her breathing and calming her nerves, but with shallow success.

“We've got this.”

She repeated those words to herself a few times, spinning them through her head and making the effort to believe them. They got this. Against all odds, this was only just another bump in the road for two very stubborn people. Mel had no other choice but to eventually fall asleep, again with the fear of isolation to disturb her dreams. Through the darkness she could feel the draft whistling through Aperture's greatly spacious areas like the testing droid repair station that hung over a pit into the center of the earth and the loud hum of factory machines building cubes, turrets, and whatever else the facility called for. She saw the burning red glow of the robots that had been shut down by the mainframe and how the darkness was thick enough to suffocate.

Mel opened her eyes. The dim light of dawn was the first thing to welcome and comfort her, and the woman relaxed, tightening the jacket over her shoulders from the freezing, crisp air coming in through cracks in the car's sides. When Mel closed her eyes to try and fall back asleep for a couple more hours, she realized that the hum of Aperture that had been in her dreams was something she was currently hearing while she was awake as well. There was the distinct, grated churning of an engine and Mel sat up to look out over the road from the window shield. Coming down the highway towards her car was a faded blue pickup truck with chipped paint and rust along the edges. It looked to be in no better shape than Mel's car, but it was running and coming right towards her.

The red-head flung the car door open and stepped out onto the road, waving her arms into the air to flag the truck down. From where she stood she began to make out a shape past the window of the vehicle. The driver was a woman, but she seemed to be the only visible passenger. However, once they were close enough, a figure leaned over the side from the back of the truck, his spikey head of brown hair whipping around in the breeze as he waved at her excitedly. Virgil cupped a hand to the side of his mouth and hollered at Mel as they came down the road. He looked so very proud of himself. “Hey, Mel! Look what I found!”

Mel was overjoyed. She stood by, only just barely managing to wait for the truck to slow down and come to a stop. The driver remained in her truck once it was parked, but Virgil jumped out of the back to meet Mel on the road the second they had stopped and the whole car rocked under his weight as he bounced off of it. Mel, barefoot on a road that was damp and chilled from the morning condensation, ran straight for Virgil and flung her arms around him in the tightest hug she could physically give him. Virgil had nearly been knocked over at the velocity she'd taken in just that small distance, but he straightened himself out and returned the gesture. “I know I said I was going to stop scaring you. Sorry about this.”

He was going to be sorry. Mel quickly let go of him, frowning furiously at the robot, and despite having hands too soft and frail to really do anything to his plated robot body, she began to whale on him. Virgil shrank away from her, surprised by the sudden switch in attitude and brought his arm up to protect himself. “Ow! OW! I can feel that you know—OW! Okay, okay! I said I'm sorry! Look, I got a truck and everything so it worked, didn't it? Ouch! Quit hitting me!”

The woman in the truck watched them curiously, leaning silently against the front wheel to observe them from the car window, but did not bother to get out of the truck to interrupt their moment.

Mel stopped, if only because her hands were starting to get sore, but her eyes were red with stress and water was collecting along the bottom lids. She'd been trying to stay mad at him with a stiff lip, but it quivered and broke the illusion that she was as angry as she wanted to let on. It was exactly like when he'd dropped off his rail to get away from Atlas and P-body, only that time he had been a pathetic, beaten up ball of metal and it felt wrong giving him a good smack. Here he was alive, happy, and perfectly stable. She could be as mad at him as she wanted to be and not feel bad about it. The woman took up a note.

That was stupid of you!

“I'm not going to even try arguing that.” Virgil's mouth pulled into a wry, lopsided frown. “It was completely stupid. I even got rained on. And boring. It was tremendously boring. But look!” He held an arm out in the direction of the truck, the woman in the driver's seat waving at them when she realized she was being addressed. “I found a town not too far from here! Its not much, but its a town. Everything's a little worn out and I might have tried, um... I might have tried stealing this truck.”

Mel raised perplexed brow at him and pointed to the running vehicle.

“Yeah. That one. I tried to hijack it to bring it out here, but then got caught by the owner—that nice lady over there in the front seat, yes. Her. She was ready to toss me up and down the place until I explained our situation and she was surprisingly nonchalant about the whole thing, considering how insane it must sound from an outsider's point of view. She offered to drive me out here to get you, on the condition that I ride in the back, and even got some extra gas packed for our car.”

Why didn't you just ask someone to begin with?

“Um...” Virgil looked behind him at the truck, the lady in the driver's seat still very patiently waiting for them while they spoke. “I got a little nervous. I mean, look at me. I have visible joints, a broken eye, and what looks to be a headlight in the cavity of my chest from a human's perspective. I'm clearly suspicious.”

Mel shrugged, but nodded. She could agree with that. He was deceptively human in many ways, but not enough to warrant immediate trust.

“Hey, why don't you two get acquainted while I fill the Gremlin up. You still have my jacket, right?” Virgil thumbed over his shoulder at the human in the truck and jogged up behind the running vehicle to climb into the back and grab for the canisters of gas they had brought. He was going to have to make a couple of trips, but once they were beside the car, Virgil leaned into the passenger window and grabbed his jacket out of the seat to slip back on. He felt weird walking around without it. It was nice to have pockets to stuff his hands into when he wasn't doing anything with them, and it had driven him crazy the whole walk.

Mel watched Virgil make himself busy, and while he was filling the Gremlin up she glanced at the woman at the front of the truck. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she wore a denim jacket over a black shirt. Mel walked up to the window of the passenger door to look in at her, not yet bold enough to approach the driver's side. She observed the other woman like she'd been a whole other species and Mel subconsciously checked for glowing eyes or the same seams that Virgil had around the neck and his wrists. She hadn't meant to be cautious, but the woman didn't seem to take any offense to it. They looked to be about the same age, or physically, at least. Mel believed herself to be a perfectly aged bottle of wine by now.

The driver then spoke up, her tone even and diligent. The woman had a stern, steeliness about her eyes that commanded attention, partnered in contrast with the warm understanding in her voice. “Can you talk?”

Mel was a little startled by the question. She shook her head.

“But you used to be able to, right?”

Mel nodded.

“Its fine, then. We'll get you fixed up once we're back. Are you injured anywhere else?”

The red-head's hand went to her stomach where the bullet had been. Though it had been removed and the wound had healed up for the most part, she still had a stabbing pain from her core if she moved around too much, so she nodded. She'd also noticed that she'd earned herself a slight limp when she walked, but she hoped that it was only temporary.

The woman in the truck kept her hands to the wheel, her slate gray eyes shifting from Mel to the window in front of her and she nodded out over the road at Virgil. “It's done filling the car.”

Mel was a little thrown off by the pronoun used for the android, at first, but when she realized she had been talking about Virgil she looked over to see that he had finished emptying the last of the gas into the Gremlin. Now that her head had cleared and she could think straight, Mel found it strange that they needed to fill the gas tank at all. It would have been more efficient to simply ride in the truck with the other human and abandon the other car altogether rather than riding along behind her. Mel studied her friend, her fingers curling into an anxious fist and relaxed again when she decided to approach him. As she walked she took a note from the thinning cube in her pocket.

Virgil closed off the clasp over the gas tank and smiled up at Mel as if nothing in the world was wrong. However, his enthusiasm thinned when he saw that she was not sharing the same energetic high that he was. “Is... something wrong? I know that other human seems a little cold, but...”

Are you leaving?

Virgil had been avoiding the subject so that they could share this victory. They had finally triumphed and it should be cause for celebration. It wasn't meant to last, though, and he knew he'd be the cause of it. She stood before him, her eyes demanding a straight answer out of the core. He wouldn't side step her. He was once able to beat around negative details when she had been in Aperture her first time through, but it seemed that it was no longer part of is nature. At least not with her.

“I had a lot of time to think while I was walking. As amazing as this place is and as happy for you as I am that you finally made it here, its not for me. I've lost a chunk of myself leaving Aperture behind. I have files that I can no longer access, just as an example. That's not even an important detail, but it made me realize how out of place I am. I'm just not... I'm not supposed to be out here, Mel. I need to be back there where I can do what I was made for. I don't expect you to understand why, because I don't fully get it either.”

Mel looked as if she would melt where she stood. Every feature of her sunk and her bright blue eyes shaded over. She reached out and grabbed for his hand hurriedly and tugged at it in the direction of the truck desperately. When he didn't budge she pulled another note out on him. He didn't stop her like he had before and let her get it out the best way she could.

I can help you live here. We can work through it.

“Mel...”

He fell silent again since the woman was already on to her next note.

You don't have to go back there.

“Mel.”

We worked so hard.

You can find purpose out here.

You deserve this just as much as I do.

I can't lose anyone else. Please, don't do this.

“Melanie.”

She had already been half way through her next protest, but the mention of her full name caused her to freeze up. Mel's hands quaked and they dropped the pen and paper. Virgil reached out for her and drew her in, wrapping his arms around the human and keeping her close. She slowly raised her hands and returned the embrace, feeling as though she had been tricked into thinking that her heart could not break anymore, but this had hurt too much. She wanted to ask him to stay with her own words and question his reasoning, but if all she could offer were small pieces of paper with writing than she could barely get an argument out. She wasn't sure that if she could speak he'd be any easier to convince. The only thing she could do to keep him longer was to stay like that.

“I'm sorry...” The ghost sensation had returned. That pressure that built up in his chest and to his forehead that he could not relieve. On pure reflex he ran a thumb under his cheek from where his head was bowed over Mel's shoulder, and in doing so he realized what it was that was bothering him. However, his cheek had been dry when he'd checked. “I have no excuses, but I am sorry. I'm going to be fine but you're going to be great. You get to leave and conquer. You... heheh. You're getting me worked up. I didn't even think that was possible.”

He pulled back, wiping his hands under his eyes again but they remained dry. He laughed at how ridiculous he must have looked. “We're a pretty good team, right? We shut down AEGIS and faced off against GLADOS head on. We beat the Mainframe, which is basically like fighting Aperture itself. Not bad for a simple Maintenance Core.”

She shook her head. He'd gotten her to smile again, if only briefly. As Mel had smiled, though, his own disappeared. This could very well be the last time they ever saw each other and he didn't want her to leave with just a few frail pieces of paper and a pen. Virgil patted himself down, searching for something he could offer her. He remembered waking up to seeing his friend had taken his goggles off in order to put them on herself and he reached for his head for them. “Uh, here. You can have these. They look better on you, anyway. Just something of me to... to keep with you. Its not all of me but its something.”

Mel accepted the goggles, running her thumb over the lens fondly. She fixed them over her bun so that they rested on top of her head in the same way Virgil wore them when they weren't being utilized. Mel mouthed to him 'thank you' and leaned forward to plant a kiss on his cheek before pulling him in for one last hug. Virgil was a little dazed by the kiss he'd gotten. It had been a new sensation, but not at all a bad one. It didn't stop him from returning the hug.

“Take care of yourself, Mel.”

Neither of them wanted to let go, but Mel was still aware there was a very kind person waiting on them to bring her back to the town. When she separated herself from Virgil, Mel held onto his hands and bobbed them up and down, giving him one last, misty smile. There were so many things she wanted to say to him. There was so much she'd wanted to share and talk about, but they had never been given the opportunity to talk like normal people. Mel couldn't, at the very least, and it had made the short time they'd spent together even briefer. When she'd collapsed and Virgil had found her food, Mel had been perfectly content with just getting to talk with him. No danger, or any good reason to run from it up until GLaDOS intervened. They just spoke for the longest time in the isolation of that ruined lobby deep in the depths of the earth. She picked up her pen from the floor, and instead of writing on the paper she used the palm of her left hand, holding it up to him with the blue ink smudging slightly, but the message was clear.

See you later, Virgil.

“Heheh... Yeah, see ya.”

She felt good about being able to return the goodbye this time, whether she could speak or not. Virgil waved to her as the human turned around to head for the truck. She opened the passenger door and situated herself into the front seat, the woman beside her reminding her to fasten her seat belt. The android stood on the road, waving until the truck had backed up and turned around, his last glimpse of Mel seen through the rear view mirror on the side and she was still waving back to him until he was too small for her to make out his face. He watched them go for a long time. The sun had finally come up over the horizon, drastically changing the sky from pink to orange and setting the fields on fire with color.

“She's out.” Virgil mumbled to himself. “She is out...Good job, Mel. Hopefully, you'll get to enjoy it this time around.” He'd never felt so conflicted, a mass of remorse and relief at odds with one another, but above it all was fulfillment. He was allowed to feel good about it, as well as sorry. Perhaps, bittersweet was the word he'd been searching for. He'd really been out of his own head, recently. It was time to head back home now that their Champion had been escorted out of the stadium.

This was a triumph.

[sarcasticgaypotato]

I really like the theme of trust when it comes to ChellDOS. Chell needs to trust that GLaDOS won't try to kill/hurt her just like GLaDOS has to trust that Chell wont murder her again. Can you use your gay magic— I mean writing skills?

(( Of course! I am always happy to use my gay magic for the sake of ChellDOS! ))Chell never thought she would come back.She struggled for so long to leave, to be set free, only to be met with disappointment. The world above Aperture was dead.  She could not find a single living human, buildings were destroyed and overrun by plants, and even animals seemed to be in scarce numbers.  The world had aged while Chell had remained the same, frozen in time as the world wasted away.There was nothing for her here.  

And regardless of this fact, if she had escaped Aperture before she was thrown into the depths of the facility’s past with nothing but her portal gun and a talkative potato, she would’ve stayed on the surface.  Let herself die up here alone, rot away knowing that she was, at the very least, free from Aperture’s grip.

But things were different now.Chell still had no affection for Aperture, nor what the company had done or stood for, even back in the day.No, she had no positive feelings for the facility itself, it was the ruler of the facility that she had grown a soft spot for.GLaDOS, of all creatures, had earned Chell’s respect, at the very least.  And, in a way, they had formed a strange bond while traveling old Aperture.Chell had seen the change in GLaDOS, and that was what changed her own opinion of the core.Maybe it was the sudden realisation and understanding of the core’s past, or maybe it was watching the AI evolve.She saw the seemingly cold, unfeeling core soften and open up, bit by bit.  She was no longer in control, she was humbled, and was forced to see the world through different eyes.In a moment of sheer curiosity, Chell had looked down at the potato, staring into the golden optic that had become something she had only ever seen as belonging to an unfeeling enemy, yet now… She saw a person.  Not a robot, not a machine, a person.And while she never could be sure, Chell believed that GLaDOS had done the exact same thing, in that same moment.However, this newfound partnership hadn’t meant that they were suddenly as thick as thieves.  GLaDOS had willingly let her go, and Chell was happy to leave.  They both wanted as much distance as possible.  Staying too close brought up questions and feelings that neither of them wanted to address. Yet here Chell was, standing once more in front of the old metal shed, staring at its rusted door.The outside world had nothing left for her, but Aperture did.  Now it was just the question of whether or not GLaDOS would even let her in.Believe it or not, she did.And Chell was soon face to face with an old enemy. Though that term hardly applied to them anymore.  When she descended into Aperture, she was met with the core’s usual sarcasm, yet it was almost endearing this time.  Almost.“I didn’t think you’d come crawling back so quickly. Miss me already?”Chell held her head up high, refusing to let the comment shift her stony expression, despite the slight urge to let it shift upon seeing the core.  No longer was she hanging off the ceiling, but instead, standing in front of the elevator in an android body that looked far too human for being made of metal.The elevator door slowly opened, and neither of them moved an inch.“…Well, if you’re going to stay here, you might as well step out of that elevator, you can’t stay there.”GLaDOS backed away, never turning her back on Chell as she moved.  And once there was a good amount of distance between them, Chell exited the elevator.  Trust was not something that they possessed for each other yet.  But today was the start of a very long journey.It had not taken long for the two of them to end up staring each other down once more, dancing on the brink of confrontation.  Chell had been messing around and got her hands on the portal gun, and had brought it into GLaDOS’s chamber without a second thought.GLaDOS had practically freaked.  She concealed it to a certain extent, but Chell saw the change in expression on her newly crafted face.  She had drawn back defensively, and her eyes looked positively icy.  She still remembered all too well what Chell had done with that portal gun in the past.Chell hadn’t caught on at first. Instead, she too found herself getting defensive, assuming that GLaDOS was getting ruffled for no reason, and taking the core’s defensive stance as a warning before an attack.   Chell too had plenty of reasons to be skeptical of GLaDOS, as the murder attempts were still fresh in her brain whenever they ended up like this.“…Get that gun out of here.”GLaDOS hissed, not daring to move.Chell narrowed her eyes, confused for a moment.“…Now.”The core was not screaming at her, nor was she threatening Chell with turrets or deadly neurotoxin.  She was uneasy rather than particularly angry, and appeared almost… afraid? That was not something Chell had come to associate with the AI, though the pieces were starting to come together in the human’s mind.  GLaDOS had proven herself to be more than capable of showing emotion, and fear had definitely been one of them.Chell looked down at the gun in her hands, and it finally clicked.  She quickly glanced up at GLaDOS, wondering for a moment if she should apologize.  Instead, she quickly rushed out of the room, not looking back.More time passed, things were getting better.  They had actually sat down and talked. About… everything.  But mainly, what their relationship would be. Chell-who wasn’t actually talking, but instead preferring to write things down and show them to the core- had finally been able to get some answers from GLaDOS, who admitted to her uneasiness around the girl, and Chell agreed likewise.  At least now they knew, and could try to work on it.They both expected this to take time, and thankfully time was something they had a lot of.What neither of them expected however, was the rather… confusing feelings that had started to surface regarding one another.Chell would never know this, but GLaDOS had harbored an… interest in Chell for a long time. But that interest was far, far from anything… safe.  It had been a hatred, an obsession, a craving.  It had died down after her time in a potato, and she assumed she’d be able to be rid of the feeling completely.  And that was partly true.  The obsession and the hate started to disappear as time went by, but they were replaced by different emotions.  Something warm and strange feeling, like a tightness in her chest.  Something she had no idea that Chell was experiencing at the same time.Of course, this matter, did not get discussed. Not verbally anyway.It grew stronger as time passed, and eventually, Chell grew tired of simply letting it be.They had both tried to practice touching each other as a part of their trust building, even though each interaction had been very brief, and barely more than a brush of the fingers against each other. Chell decided to change that.She approached GLaDOS carefully, making herself known by walking towards the core head on, having learned to never sneak up on her. She cleared her throat a little, looking up at the AI and gesturing with her hand for the robot to come closer. “What is it now? You’ve already had dinner, you aren’t getting seconds.”Chell rolled her eyes, scoffing slightly under her breath. Once the core had gotten close enough, she rummaged through her jumpsuit pockets to find the pre-written note that she made for this.‘Can I try something?’“Well you’re going to need to do a better job of explaining, for one.”GLaDOS responded with snark, though her tone held no bite. It hadn’t for awhile actually, now that Chell thought about it. Instead, the sarcastic comments and remarks that many people would find quite rude had shifted. Chell wasn’t offended by them, yet she didn’t need to ignore them anymore either.  She found herself smiling at half of them, like this was an old joke between her and the core.Still, GLaDOS was right. She ought to explain herself better.She pointed to her hand, then gestured to GLaDOS.To her surprise, the core caught on instantly, her eyebrows raising slightly as her golden optics studied Chell.“…Alright, try whatever it is you want.”That came as even more of a surprise, though it was quite the pleasant one.  It wasn’t often that GLaDOS put that much faith in her. She didn’t want to mess this up.

Like many times before, she carefully reached out and touched GLaDOS’s hand.  The core tensed for a moment, before relaxing. This was not uncharted territory.  Slowly, Chell moved, lacing her fingers with the AI’s, constantly watching the android’s face for any signs of discomfort.She found none.Instead, the core looked at her with surprise, and a hint of something else. Contentment maybe?Chell wasn’t sure.  But she held this touch for awhile, liking the warmth that roared up in her chest that it caused.  Aperture was often so cold, and it had been so long since Chell had been around other humans, she had forgotten what physical affection had felt like.Minutes went by, maybe even hours.  It was so hard to tell time down here, but it felt like years had passed when GLaDOS pulled away.  She was slow in her actions instead of her usual jerky movements when it came to this sort of thing.  She was relaxed.  A relaxed GLaDOS was NOT something Chell saw often.  Even if the core was in a good mood, she was hardly relaxed.“…That… wasn’t as horrible as I had expected. Perhaps… we should continue to study this tomorrow.”Chell smiled.  That was the best reaction she could possibly hope for.And study it they did. Step by step, they put themselves on display for the other, showing their weakness just long enough for the other to study it, and try to learn how to adapt to it.A little over a year later, they were both surprised with their progress.  They weren’t perfect, they knew that.  Chell was rather jumpy about her neck being touched, and GLaDOS was still a little uneasy whenever Chell was holding a Portal gun or anything that could be used as a weapon.But despite that, they were proud enough of the steps they had taken as is.Chell found herself standing in her room, waiting for the core.  They had planned to spend some time together, and GLaDOS promised to meet her here. And, perfectly on time, a knock on the door sounded, before it opened on its own.  Knocking wasn’t necessary for someone who controlled the whole facility, but Chell liked to know where the core was if they were going to be interacting. No surprises.And so, as GLaDOS approached her, she’d give a brief, verbal warning before touching the girl.The AI carefully wrapped her arms around Chell’s waist, keeping her grip loose and relaxed, as to not make the human feel trapped. Gently, she pressed her forehead against the ex-test subject, giving her a sort of nuzzle that Chell quickly returned.“…Hey.”The core smirked, looking down at Chell as she spoke.“Is this all you had planned? When you said you wanted to spend time together, I didn’t think you meant you just wanted to stand here.”Chell rolled her eyes, a smile tugging at her lips.  She didn’t want to pull away to grab a pencil and paper, so instead she simply mouthed the words, knowing full well that GLaDOS could read her lips very well.‘Well I wasn’t planning on standing, but I have a perfectly nice sofa that we could move this to.’Chell watched as the core’s optics seemed to gleam, almost sparkling with amusement.“…Can I pick you up?”Despite the affection that was being shared between them, both of them never failed to ask before changing their position or form of affection. They cared for each other, no doubt, but sudden movements could be unnerving for both, especially ones that involved direct physical contact.  However with proper warning, it was welcomed.Chell nodded, very carefully moving her arms to loosely wrap around the core’s neck as she found herself scooped up into the cool metal arms of her partner.It was strange in a way, to finally be able to give her trust to someone who, many months ago, she wouldn’t have let touch her.  She supposed GLaDOS felt the same.Yet, as she found herself being set down on the soft cushion of the couch, and she moved closer to the core who joined her moments after, she found that she didn’t care. What did it matter how things had been? It was time to enjoy the now. She wasted little time joining the metallic woman’s hand with her own, and gently resting her head against the core’s chest, who let out a soft hum of contentment at her actions.Trust had taken time to begin, and it would take even longer to keep going, but it had been worth it.