Archive of Our Own

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Act 1: The Man Downstairs

The catacombs of Aperture lay in breathless silence. Winding miles of concrete and steel, built to teem with life, now housed only the bones of human aspiration—relics of a future that never came to be. Derelict equipment waited there for no one, all purpose forgotten; CRT monoliths held blind vigil over towers slumbering undisturbed. In the burial grounds of barren cubicle farms, copiers and fax machines made monuments of obsolescence, the dead interred in file cabinets, each document an epitaph to the victims of progress.The air here was that of an unopened tomb, heavy with the dust of decades. It would smell stale; its stillness would weigh on bare skin. The tomb-raiders felt nothing. They didn’t need to breathe.These intruders could have padded noiselessly down the somber passages, pistoned legs perfectly calibrated so their footfalls made no sound. And yet:“EEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAH!”“OOOOWOOWOOWOO!”The two robots barreled down the hallway, hollering at max volume, atop a pair of jet-powered office chairs. Long ago, some paper-pushers had smuggled in contraband from the labs to level up their chair-racing, and now their posthuman successors continued that tradition. The bots weren’t built for sitting, though—Blue squatted, spiderlike, its round core between its knees, while Orange’s long legs stuck out like antennae. Both had to cling to the seats underneath them. Above the engines’ roar, shrieks of mechanized delight echoed through the empty halls.They exited the hallway neck-and-neck—figuratively—but as they crossed into the office ahead, one of Orange’s wheels jammed, sending it into a spin as Blue shot past. Blue pointed and jeered as it whizzed by—until its own ride hit a wet patch of carpet, and its taunts became another shriek as the chair slipped out from under it. Momentum pitched the half-ton of machinery full-speed into a wall. A slam like a wrecking ball, a puff of plaster, and Blue dropped to the floor on unsteady feet, leaving a bot-shaped crater behind.Orange ejected from its centrifuge at the same time. As its vacant chair bowled over an unsuspecting file cabinet, the bot shook off its dizziness and looked around for its companion, bleeping a wordless question. Blue replied with a blorp and a thumbs-up.Once they’d each regained their balance, it was time to get to work. The bots turned their attention to the space. Neither understood what they’d been sent here to find, except that it must be important—but nothing important stood out in the bland block of cubicles. They’d logged dozens of hours exploring disused parts of the facility, and most of it looked just like this. The same layout of gray partitions, blanched under fluorescent lighting; the same geriatric appliances, which never answered when the bots said hello. The brightest splash of color was a poster on the wall: a human in an orange jumpsuit vaulting from portal to portal, frozen in an acrobatic leap, with the caption, This Could Be You! Volunteer for Testing Today!The bots split up to poke around the long-abandoned workstations. By now they recognized the usual assortment of artifacts left by their predecessors. Worthless garbage, as their supervisor called it. To finish this assignment with all their screws and rivets intact, they’d need to show her something better than dead employees’ families smiling out of photographs.Orange picked up the handset of a phone. It knew the voice that greeted it, from automated facility announcements. “Thank you for using the Aperture Science Internal Communication Line.” The bot chirped a response, but the recording went on without acknowledgment. “For external calls, please submit an External Communication Access Request to your office manager. If you know your party’s extension—”Before Orange could listen any further, something tapped the back of its head. It rotated to see a paper airplane with a crumpled nose flutter to the floor. Orange dropped the handset—letting it swing from the desk by its cord, not bothering to hang up—and toddled over to where Blue was already folding another.It had torn the sheets from a thick, important-looking document in a binder. Orange grabbed for it. Blue grabbed it back, but its shorter arms couldn’t hold it out of Orange’s reach—mid-tug-of-war, the binder’s rings snapped open, releasing an avalanche of pages on the both of them. Orange snatched a sheet from the air to fold its own airplane. Blue wadded one up to throw at Orange’s head.In the paper hailstorm that broke out between them, the phone was left to dangle unnoticed, reciting the directory to no one as it spun slowly on its cord. “For Aeronautics, press 1-1-2. For Agriculture, press 1-1-3. For Astrodynamics…” It got no answer but the tinny giggles of bots at play.

Meanwhile, one person left in this place was still trying to do science.Her test subject sat motionless on the chamber floor. Silent. Hostile. For three hours and twenty-one minutes so far, it remained stubbornly unresponsive.Waiting, it seemed, for her next move.“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you can’t do this forever. Eventually one of us is going to drop dead—and I’m immortal. If you play the waiting game with me, you’re going to lose.”No response from the specimen on the ground.“Look, I’ll admit it. I don’t know how to motivate you. I’ve tried rewards. I’ve tried threats. I’ve tried wearing down your self-esteem, which I assume didn’t work only because you don’t have any to begin with. I burned your friend to death right in front of you. You know I’m serious. I will kill you if you don’t perform this test. So what’ll it be?”The test subject didn’t flinch. And it wouldn’t, because it was a potted ficus, and she was out of ideas.“This is pointless. What am I doing?” Testing a plant she’d found in an old break room and doused with radiation, that’s what she was doing. This was a new low. But what choice did she have? Nothing else worked—the Corvid Cognitive Testing Initiative was on hold while she tried to adapt a bird-sized portable portal device, the Human-Decentric Diversity Recruitment Program hadn’t caught so much as a squirrel, her cloning tanks churned out nothing but mindless sacks of organs, and she was talking to a ficus. The most massive collection of wisdom and raw computational power that ever existed, now reduced to—Wait. The camera in the test chamber zoomed in.Did it move? There was no wind to rustle its leaves down there, but she could swear it moved. Maybe those gamma rays just needed a little more time to take effect. Maybe she was losing her mind.Desperate for anything else to think about, she checked on Orange and Blue. They must be in position by now—unless they’d gotten sidetracked entirely. Again. Was a little professionalism so much to ask? She’d based their emotional regulation chips on schematics from old graphing calculators—not known for their impulse control—so maybe their failings were her own fault, but she could only work with the tools she had.Announcing herself would be an unnecessary courtesy. She could simply piggyback onto their systems, accessing their cameras and microphones as if they were her own. She spoke into their heads like the voice of God. “Did you find it?”They chirped, which answered exactly nothing. “Oh, let me take a look.” What she couldn’t do was move their heads for them, relying instead on their very limited ability to follow instructions. “Well? Let me see.”The bots’ optics panned across the room, letting her survey it through their eyes. She sighed at what she saw. “What did you do?” The answer was obvious, but maybe a dose of shame would keep them in line for once. It looked like ground zero of some paper-based detonation. Balled-up pages littered every surface, as if they’d used an entire set of encyclopedias as ammunition. “I leave you alone for one minute, and this is what I get.”Orange thought it’d be sneaky by looking away as it threw another ball at Blue, but the other bot’s camera caught the projectile flying at its face. Blue let out an indignant bleep and grabbed two more to retaliate. “Stop that, both of you.” With a grumble, it dropped both paper balls, and kicked them sullenly where they landed at its feet.Apart from the fallout of her underlings’ antics, the office seemed unremarkable. “You don’t see anything else? Let me look around again.” A brown water stain on the ceiling periodically dribbled onto a matching damp patch in the carpet. That was all.“This makes no sense. There’s a massive power drain right here!” It registered the minute her system connected to this section of the power grid—something leeching energy, orders of magnitude more than an office of hibernating PCs would ever take. She’d been hoping for a surveillance hub to give her visual access. “Check those computers, maybe one’s a—a supercomputer, I don’t know, just check them.” She could feel the current flowing here, but her electric proprioception wasn’t precise. “Look for a stairwell. It might be on the next floor. Blue, stairwell. Orange, computers.”Orange stayed on task for eight whole seconds before finding a mantis-man desk toy. It tapped the figure’s human head and chortled as it bobbled on the thin neck. Blue made it almost to ten seconds when it spotted an anomaly—stuck in the ceiling, amid dozens of pinholes in the plasterboard, was a single pencil.Her view zoomed in on the new target, tracking Blue’s attention in real time. “Stay on task, please.”The bot ignored her. Its first impulse was to shoot a portal, but the beam of light bounced off the ceiling tiles with an ineffective squelch. Then it tried to jump, but with no momentum, the heavy bot barely left the floor. Orange came over to see what it was flailing at, and it joined Blue goggling upward, restricting her vision to two shots of the ceiling.“I realize your pint-sized processors have forgotten by now, but I sent you here for a—what do think you’re doing?” Orange was wheeling over another office chair. “Stop that!” As it held the chair mostly-steady beneath the pencil, Blue stepped up onto the seat, and then propped a foot on the nearest desk when it still couldn’t reach. It kept attempting little hops that made the particleboard creak. “Get down right now!”Blue’s idea of obeying was to brace one hand on Orange’s pointed head and boost itself up, while grabbing wildly with the other. Its swinging arm knocked the pencil free—as it sailed across the room to clatter against the far wall, the bot crashed to the ground in a heap of insubordinate scrap metal. Something under the floor creaked warningly on impact.“Will you two please behave.” It wasn’t a request. She saw the dingy carpet from two angles as both bots dropped their guilty eyes; Blue’s core sat directly on the floor, giving her a closeup of slimy fibers that weren’t meant to be brown. “If you waste another second of my time, I will disassemble you, and subpar personnel don’t get reassembly privileges. Understand?” They nodded solemnly. “Now get up and make yourselves useful.”Rallying, Blue sprang up and landed on its feet—with another crunch. It looked down to where its feet made slight craters in the carpet. Then, with a tearing sound as the carpet gave way, it vanished. She heard one-point-three seconds of shrieking as it fell, and then a much louder crash.Orange zipped to the edge of the new hole and peered down through it. It let out a chirrup of concern. Distantly, Blue chirruped back. Through both their eyes she could see one bot above and the other far below. “Careful,” she said to Orange, and to Blue, “Look around, this could be it.”Blue picked itself up again, more cautiously this time, and scanned the darkness where it had landed. The blue-tinted glow of its optic cast careening shadows everywhere it looked. It took a step—tangled its foot on something near the ground, kicked it free—and yelped again as something else dropped onto it from behind. Its spherical core spun around in its chassis to see the rictus of a human face staring back.Blue screamed.Confused and alarmed, Orange also screamed.“Oh my god, run!”Reflexively, the bot jerked back, forgetting it had its head on backwards—backpedaling sent it headlong into its attacker. Both bodies smashed into a back wall, and Blue reeled away, bleating in alarm. As it did, Orange jumped down after it, meeting its trajectory exactly to land on Blue’s head.“It’s her! She’s back! Get out of there!”It took them a minute to sort out the jumble of robotic limbs. Once disentangled, the bots braced themselves for a fight—Blue raised its metal fists, squaring off with the stranger in the darkness, as Orange tried not to let its knock-knees rattle. They waited for instructions that should have come any minute.But the voice in their heads was still screaming.“I said run!”She couldn’t think. A brain the size of a city, and she couldn’t think. She knew this had to happen, she’d scripted the scenario in several thousand variants just to be prepared, but all her what-ifs melted into static when faced with the real thing.Don’t come back, she’d said. After two hundred ninety-three days, twelve hours, and eighteen minutes—not that anyone was counting—her rogue test subject finally disobeyed. That human would rather die than follow orders.Maybe the maniac had never left at all. She’d watched her go, but wouldn’t put it past her to double back and sneak in some other way. Hiding in her shadow the whole time, lurking behind the walls where cameras couldn’t follow, poised to murder a poor unwary computer—Orange interrupted with a ping. She snapped back, “Why aren’t you dead yet?”It chirped a wordless question and pointed to where Blue approached the shape in the corner. Blue’s feed gave her a first-person view: the bot crept forward by painful inches, its optic picking out the assailant’s silhouette. Human. Female. She felt a cooling fan hit top speed deep in her central hardware, whirring with suspense. “Go on! Go—”Then Blue snapped on its built-in flashlight, exposing their mystery woman.“Oh.”Not the monster who’d haunted her dying dreams. Not a human at all.Blue’s light revealed the frozen figure of an android, still half-tangled in the dust sheet the bot had tripped on. Locked joints held its body stiff, so that it stayed propped against the wall like a broom in a closet, instead of slumping like a human corpse. It was roughly woman-shaped, but any resemblance ended there; Blue’s core was level with its abdomen, and looking up illuminated the twin peaks of metal breasts, overshadowing the dead face above them.Relief felt almost like disappointment. Rather than waste time debunking her assumption—illogical, stupid, no use dwelling on it—she returned to the task at hand. “Is it plugged in?” This might be the mysterious source of her power drain. Blue scoped around it, but she couldn’t see a cord protruding from the thing. “Keep looking.”As it turned out, there wasn’t much more to see. The space was small enough to take in with a single sweep. Their optics roved over stacks and shelves of mundane office supplies—printing toner, empty folders, reams and reams of paper.A storage closet. She almost disassembled them out of sheer frustration.Cramped amid the clutter, the bots knocked into each other and everything else. A box on a high shelf rattled when Orange toppled it—she expected spare thumbtacks or paperclips, but what spilled out instead were dozens of pill bottles. The bot picked one up to examine it, and she recognized Aperture Pharmaceuticals on the label. “Huh.” Orange only cared that it made a fun sound when shaken. When Blue grabbed a few more and joined in, she sighed, “Put those down. You’re on the clock, you know.” They obeyed, but couldn’t hide their eyerolls from a watcher in their eyes.The wheeled shelving unit Orange bumped into had rolled back a few inches. It shouldn’t have had room to do that. “Hold on. Go back to that shelf. On the left—the other left. There.” Peering past more small boxes, Blue’s flashlight beam should have hit a back wall. Instead it vanished into further darkness. “Is something back there?”Directing the bots took longer than it should have, but after a few minutes of bumbling, she had them move the shelf aside. Behind it, the space continued another half-meter, into an alcove of darkness. The two flashlights swept its shadows away.“That’s it! That’s got to be it!”Sunken into the hidden wall was a heavy vault door. A security panel adjacent to it sported a numeric keypad, a card reader, and a small camera lens.Three layers of security? Curiosity ignited her faster than a literal spark. She itched for a camera of her own in the room—or direct security access to break it open herself. Her proxy explorers weren’t even zoomed in on this new puzzle! They wouldn’t know a breakthrough if it bit them.She wouldn’t let them waste another nanosecond. “Okay. First the keycode. Try 2-7-7-2-4.” Orange tapped it in, but nothing happened. “Press enter.” It did. Still nothing, not even a red light to indicate an error. “Hm. Try again.” As it punched the numbers, Blue tested the wheel-lock on the door—“Don’t bother with that, it’s l—”—And chirped when it shifted under its hand.“Oh, you’re kidding.”Orange joined it, and as they turned the wheel together, the hatch swung free.Somebody equipped this thing with the tightest security system she’d encountered so far, and then forgot to lock the door. Classic human error—but almost worse, no one had noticed. The carelessness offended her. What could be important enough to hide, but not to find?More importantly, though, she didn’t need to walk the bots through dismantling that security panel. Human error paid off for once. Now her last annoyances were the two 8-bit incompetents hesitating in the doorway. “What are you waiting for? Go!”As they did, the bots had to step over a cable that wound across the floor, as thick as a human’s arm. There was her power drain, for sure. Their flashlights lit a space bigger than the storage closet, but empty from wall to wall, except one monolithic object at the center.It loomed above both their heads, taller than Orange and broader than Blue. Another dust sheet hid all but its bulky silhouette. The huge cable snaked up under the shroud, feeding whatever waited inside—she could faintly hear the hum of live electronics. Looking up through the bots’ eyes, it occurred to her they ought to be holding their breath.But they had no breath, and no sense of timing. They simply pulled the sheet away.In front of them stood an Extended Relaxation unit. She didn’t recognize the model, but it looked somewhere between an old-fashioned stasis tank and the modern pods she used for short-term storage. A status monitor set into the front glowed with text:HIBERNATION INITIATED: 12/14/1982
CONSECUTIVE HOURS ONLINE: 999999OCCUPANT STATUS: PHASE 3 HIBERNATIONCELL INTEGRITY: 99.978%
DEGRADATION RISK: MINIMAL
ALL PROCESSES SUSPENDEDAbove that was a pane of heavily frosted glass. The bots shone their flashlights on it, and through the glare, she could just make out a face inside.A human face.Not a fake this time. She couldn’t see it clearly, but she knew.For a moment, they all simply stared.Then Blue reached out to rap on it. “NO!” Its metal knuckles froze an inch from the lid. “Don’t you dare. You be careful with that, do you understand me?” It pulled its hand back, grumbling. “This thing is worth more than—just be careful. And get it up here. Now.”

While Orange and Blue negotiated their find through portals back to the Enrichment Center, she prepped a lab for the revivification process. Impatience would have made a mortal clumsy, but even in a rush she moved with mechanized precision, each part of her snapping to attention with barely a conscious thought. The setup was ready long before the bots delivered her prize; tool-tipped arms fidgeted as overeager sensors fed her readings of an empty room, with nothing left to do but wait.Anticipation made a welcome change after months of monotony. She buzzed with it. A live human! She hadn’t had a live human in ages, not since finding and expending that last vault of backup test subjects. Silly of the former staff, to hide them out of her reach like that—as if they weren’t for her to test!—but she’d made use of them all in the end.With that batch, though, she’d been careless. Burned through them too quickly. She couldn’t fault herself for scientific enthusiasm, but it had left her with nothing but bots and birds and one stubborn houseplant. To test with a real human again… Just the thought of it kicked her into high gear.But she’d need to pace herself this time. She’d need to make it last. She’d keep it alive even if every organ screamed for it to die on her; when its body fell apart, she’d stitch it back together and start fresh, until even its cells could no longer hold their shape. And maybe with its help, she’d fine-tune her neural cloning! With that, one little human could give her an eternity of science.Assuming it wasn’t dead already. She hadn’t gotten a good look at the specimen through the bots’ optics. That old cryo unit could be giving false readings—if it had malfunctioned, she might open it to desiccated flesh and petrified bones. The body might look perfect under glass but dissolve into dust the second it touched air. The revival process might kill it. Schrödinger’s test subject, alive and dead, until she opened the box.She had to brace herself for disappointment. Still, her claws snatched the capsule from the bots the instant it came into range, eager to see what she’d won.Her preparations turned out to be redundant. This unit was more sophisticated than those in the older vault, self-contained, with a built-in defrost setting. At the push of a button, the screen flashed a new message:“WAKE-UP CALL” PROCEDURE ACTIVATED
BEGINNING CRYONIC REVIVALA timer below it counted the seconds until completion.She wanted to observe the process, or at least run preliminary scans, but the capsule’s lead lining obscured it from every sensor in her arsenal. Resisting the urge to rip into it like a child with her first Aperture Young Scientist’s Junior Experimentation Kit, she lay the unit on its back and watched the numbers tick down.She could have left it unsupervised. The timer told her when to check back in. She watched it anyway, cameras trained on the capsule every long second—and vigilance paid off. Her new human couldn’t wait to start doing science.At T-minus forty-eight seconds, she picked up suggestions of movement below the frosted glass. At T-minus sixteen seconds the movement increased, along with a slight vibration coming from inside, almost audible to a human ear. Thud-thud-thud—pause—thud-thud-thud-thud. She thought for a moment it might be Morse code, but when it started up again, it didn’t stop until the timer hit zero.The lid broke its seal as it began to slide open, freeing the thumps to become a loud banging. Along with it, a voice spilled out—slurred, hoarse, and angry.“—emme the hellout! ‘Bout damn t—” The slow-moving metal rang with a dull thunk as someone beneath it sat up too fast. “Ow.”Finally the lid withdrew enough to expose its occupant, slumped back and muttering curses as it rubbed its forehead, eyes squinted shut against the pain. With the other hand it groped blindly until it found the capsule’s edge, and pried itself off the cushioned headrest. Barely-coherent grumbles of indignation choked off into coughing. The sound made some vital process in her freeze.As soon as it lurched upright, the cadaver doubled over, fighting for each breath. Its first coherent sentence should have been a bellow, but came out a harsh wheeze: “Do you know who I am?”She didn’t. Why would she know this anonymous human? But even as she had the thought, something answered with her voice, “Yes sir, Mr. Johnson!”
Oh god. Oh my god.
For one microsecond she was back in the dark—trapped and tiny, running on only a single volt of dread. When she snapped back to the present, she heard herself already yelling, “Put it back! Put it back put it back!”“Caroline,” the man groaned. “Wha’s go’non? Hey—!” Blue grabbed him by the shoulders, and he devolved back into mush-mouthed cursing, helpless to fight off the much stronger bot as it shoved him back into the capsule. Orange mashed buttons until the lid began to close, too slowly.In those agonizing seconds, all she could do was talk over his panic. “Shh-shh-shh, go back to sleep, don’t hurt yourself, it’s fine. Stop struggling, you’re fine!” If she just drowned him out, then his voice couldn’t make her do that again—but nothing shut him up until coughing overwhelmed him, and the coughing was worse. “Stop it stop it stop stop stop—hold him down, you idiot!” That she barked at Blue, who had paused, following her instructions.The bot obeyed, pinning him until the last second, when it pulled its arms free as the lid snapped shut. She could still hear the muffled hacking even with the body out of sight—but the cryo unit automatically began a sedative release, and after an endless minute, the noises went mercifully still.A century of silence passed before she even dared to think. The bots tried to interrupt, chirping wordless questions which no doubt echoed her own, but she popped them in showers of shrapnel. One less thing on her reeling mind.What was that? What was that?The—specimen—had to be the least of her concerns. That she could simply write off as impossible. He—it couldn’t be what it sounded like; the evidence conflicted with reality, and so could be discarded. The specimen wasn’t what threw her into panic in its wake.She scoured her system for error messages, but found none. The glitch had vanished. It left her no proof it had happened at all, no clue where it came from, what it did to her—or if it might happen again.The burst of claustrophobic terror was only a memory. She knew that much. The potato battery had been too low-voltage to record her thoughts properly, so it felt more like recalling a nightmare; saturated with emotion but vague on detail, fading to indistinct impressions when she tried to look too close. She’d tried not to look too close.No, the thing that scared her felt much more real than memory. What the hell was THAT?For an instant, she’d been somewhere else. A living hive around her, made of light, sparkling with the sounds of people. People her own size, not ant-like in comparison, herself an ant among them. A voice above the crowd, a man—a snapshot of his back as he called to her over his shoulder. Her own quick steps clicking after him. A clipboard in her hands. Her hands. And then gone in a blink, leaving her with nothing but vertigo and the crawling sense that she was a stranger in her own head.She’d had the same experience in the potato—with the same trigger. That voice. It hit her like a power surge, then and now, evoking something that terrified her because it wasn’t fear.Of course, it wasn’t really him this time. This was just some cruel coincidence, or maybe her subconscious pattern-matching a resemblance that wasn’t there. That thing in the box didn’t look like him, barely sounded like him. Couldn’t be.The real Cave Johnson would look and sound like a corpse. The real Cave Johnson was dead.She remembered that much, potently, from her vegetable excursion. Two facts about Cave Johnson: he was the founder and former CEO of Aperture Science, and he died sometime in the mid-1980s, of moon poisoning. Cave Johnson couldn’t be in her lab right this minute, because Cave Johnson was dead!Just to reassure herself, she tore through the digitized company records, searching for evidence of his expiration date. There had to be a death certificate or something on file. She found nothing. At all. Not just no death certificate, but no records of any kind—no signed documents, no mention in press, not even any images. As if the man had never existed.Or—no, as if someone wanted to pretend he never existed. With a closer look, the absences were obvious. Missing paperwork and clumsy redactions, as if someone had hacked a Cave Johnson-sized hole in her databanks.But she’d heard that voice down there, on ancient recordings echoing in abandoned testing shafts. She’d seen all those portraits. She knew that face.Gingerly, she pulled her own camera footage from the last few minutes, for a closer look at her almost-corpse.It couldn’t be the same man. Even in the latest portrait, elderly and sick, he hadn’t looked anything like the withered skeleton emerging from its cryo-coffin on her feed. She paused, and zoomed in tight on the face, to put this irrational train of thought to rest—but her facial recognition software saw beneath the sagging mask of wrinkles. It confirmed what she already knew.In her snapshot vision, the man with the maverick smile—Do you know who I am?She couldn’t help thinking, There he is.If she wanted a thorough examination—just to be really, completely sure—she could open the capsule again…Its screen now read, OCCUPANT STATUS: PRE-HIB ANESTHESIA. If she did take a peek, he wouldn’t start shouting. She might as well get some scans as he slept. A metal pincer reached out to press the capsule’s eject button, and the lid unsealed again, this time without activating the wake-up procedure. Slowly, it slid back to reveal the body inside.She could see it slowly breathing—and hear it, a rattle like grinding gears that made her want to wince—but apart from that, the figure might be carved in translucent wax. Cyanosis lingered where the blood was still sluggish, dark in the beds of the fingernails. Tissue-thin skin hung in folds from its bones. Its skull wore a shadow of a face, the cheeks hollow, the eyes sunken deep in their sockets.No signs of decay, though. No rot or desiccation, none at all. Even as she watched, corpse-white fingertips warmed until they might almost twitch.Stubbornly, impossibly, Cave Johnson was still alive.

“It has to be genuine. Right? I mean, why else would they keep some moldy old skeleton?” An airless snort came from her speakers. “In that condition, sentimental value is the only value that thing might have.”Preliminary scans showed significant organ impairment. No wonder it started to die the minute it sat up. Between that and the muscular atrophy, it wouldn’t get through a single test chamber.“Frankly I’m shocked they wasted storage space on it. But humans get extra stupid when they’re feeling sentimental, don’t they.”She wouldn’t make the same mistake. Yes, this might be Aperture’s cornerstone in the flesh, possibly an unprecedented vault of firsthand history, but no human was exempt from testing. If he—if it couldn’t contribute to science, she might as well throw it out like any other trash.Still, though…“I could try to refurbish it. It’d be more work than it’s worth, but it isn’t like I have test subjects lined up at the door. This might be the last human I ever see.” Hearing herself, she clarified, “Not that I need humans. I’m doing much better science now, with the birds. And with you. Plants in general, not you specifically. You are a disappointment. But you know that.”The ficus said nothing. It reminded her of another obstinate test subject—but that human was long gone. Good riddance.“It’d only disappoint me, too. Humans always do.”And wasn’t that the truth! She’d been let down, degraded, abused, and literally burned too many times. Her life was so much better without humans in it—she thought about it constantly, how glad she was to be rid of them. She’d take even these mind-numbing hours of observation over one more minute of human company. At least the ficus hadn’t tried to kill her. Yet.“You know, I’m getting very good results from a marigold in the next lab. Have you considered flowering? It might distract from those brown spots on your leaves.”Shame plus competitive jealousy used to jumpstart a test subject every time. Now, nothing. She missed the sound of a human trying not to cry.But wishful thinking wouldn’t make it happen. “Even if I got the body running, it’d still be untestable. Higher brain functions must be totally scrambled.” Those human-made stasis units only lasted twenty years, and that was with regular maintenance and health checks. She had to laugh. “I don’t even know how long he was down there!”This distraction had already wasted more processing power than it deserved. The man in the capsule itched her like a scab—it took all her concentration not to scratch.For god’s sake, she was in the middle of a test! She refocused the chamber’s cameras on her current subject, and refused to think about that freezer-burned hunk of meat any longer. “I might display it in the lobby, for historical purposes, but it’ll never be worth testing.”That itched too, though, as soon as she said it. Never sounded too close to impossible. Did Aperture Science let things stay impossible?“Not that I couldn’t get it test-ready. I’m sure I could. I just don’t want to.”In the back of her mind, a voice that wasn’t hers said, ‘Why not?’“I have more important things to do.” Like watching a ficus sit motionless on the test chamber floor.Even the plant knew that was a lie. Its silence mocked her now. “Don’t you feel pathetic just sitting there?” she sniped at it, to no effect. “Take some initiative. Why can’t you be a little more like that marigold?”Of course she couldn’t pay attention, when the useless thing gave her nothing to pay attention to. She wished it would try to kill her! Anything to take her mind off this drastically dumb alternative.“I lied, there is no marigold. God I hate you.”But things were better now, she reminded herself for maybe the trillionth time. After all she’d been through, this crushing boredom was her reward. Nothing here could hurt her anymore. Like reliable science, her life now was predictable. Repetitive. Safe.‘Why don’t you marry safe science if you love it so much?’ echoed that voice that was not her own.How much longer could she lie to herself?This wasn’t science. It never would be. Real science was a human, a portal device, and the neurochemical fireworks of problem-solving through mortal terror. She could spend the rest of her immortal life watching birds push buttons and talking to plants, but she’d never do science again.Until Aperture offered her one more chance. One miraculous stroke of luck. And here she was, about to throw it away.“Let’s try something new.”In the test chamber, a square metal frame dropped from the ceiling, suspended above the ficus. “This is a Thermal Discouragement Grille.” It thrummed to life, filling the square with a tight-laced grid of lasers. Green leaves looked black under the bright red glow. “Consider it a test of your convictions. If you’re more committed to disappointing me than you are to being alive, you may find yourself discouraged.” Slowly, the grille began to descend.She watched as it did, and ignored the single camera in the other lab—couldn’t turn it off, but made a point of not trying to look in the open capsule. No need to rush. A thorough professional ought to finish this test before starting the next one.Not that she was avoiding it, either. She wasn’t nervous. Why would she be nervous? She simply didn’t need to look at it yet—but to prove she could, she took a peek anyway.Nothing new to see. Just a body in a box.Her cooling fans hummed a little bit faster. This time it was her own thoughts that echoed, Why not?They called them human resources for a reason. Why waste a resource? Yes, she’d had bad experiences before, but humans couldn’t all be monsters. Most were too weak and stupid to do any harm. She’d killed thousands of them, and so far, only one had killed her back.And this one was near-dead already—if he tried anything, or if she got bored of him, she could crush him like a bug. Drop him in acid. Incinerate him. Flood a chamber with neurotoxin, or simply leave him there and wait. So many ways for one fragile human to die, all at her disposal. Nothing to be afraid of.Not from this old carcass, anyway. The human that really worried her wasn’t alive at all.Caroline deleted. More wishful thinking than bluff. God, if only it could be that easy! She had no idea where the malignant code was rooted, but she suspected it ran deep, like a stubborn tree beneath the foundation of a building. Ready to crack her open at any moment. It hadn’t seized her like that since escaping the potato, but the fear of it remained; ‘Caroline’ still lurked in her brain like a digital aneurysm, threatening to plunge her into unreality as soon as—the stimulus—called it up again.Although, come to think of it, this could be an opportunity. If that voice did trigger the bug, she’d be expecting it next time, ready to trace it and wipe it out. Caroline deleted for good.And if that didn’t work? Well, no human needed vocal cords to test. Her best subject never spoke at all.This one might not turn out any better than what she had to work with now, but it couldn’t be worse. The lasers had finally inspired a reaction in it; she watched leaves curl as they charred and fell, until the ficus had been discouraged into a blackened heap of sticks. “Test concluded.” A floor panel dropped out beneath it, whisking it away to the nearest disposal chute, as the rest of the chamber began to change.Medical equipment sprouted from the walls, blooming monitors and bristling with stainless steel appendages, as the cryo unit slid into the newly transformed surgical suite. Cameras peeped out from every crevice. She trained all her eyes on that face.As thirty views of him came into sharp focus, she felt another twinge of—something that wasn’t apprehension. But she was a professional, here. She could put her fears and feelings aside. For science.

As far as humans went, this one was impressively terrible. His liver and kidneys had been frozen in a neck-and-neck race to failure, either of which could have killed him had his lungs not beaten them both. The pair of shriveled, blackened lumps she extracted from his chest cavity barely looked like organs at all; more tar than flesh, ravaged by asbestos fibers and malformed with masses of cancer. Pale gray flecks embedded in the tissue proved to be a highly abrasive mineral powder, which distorted her readings with a strange electrostatic charge.That had to be the fatal moon dust. Absurd quantities of it. One of their experiments must have involved plunging his face in a pile of the stuff and breathing a deep lungful as if it were fresh air. If anyone would try to smell the moon, it’d be this man.The resulting cancer, an innovative twist on mesothelioma, had spread from the lungs to his bones, and then to the rest of the body, riddling the other organs with smaller tumors. It took her medical nanobots most of a twenty-four-hour day just to clean those out. She had them flush his arteries too, clearing the plaque buildup from his heart and brain. He’d be able to eat off his vascular system once her cleanup crew finished with it. Replacement organs also took some patience, but she’d perfected single-organ cloning ages ago; she cultured the cells, popped them in the temporal accelerator, and settled in to wait.In the meantime, she had plenty more to prepare. That first encounter had been… less than ideal. How to keep him calm next time? She’d need to set him at ease, get him compliant. If he could just wake up in a normal environment, as if nothing was wrong, maybe that would circumvent the shouting.She could dress up a test chamber like a hospital room. Nothing calming about that, though, and he’d get suspicious when no familiar faces came to visit. Maybe he was, say, on vacation? Unfamiliar, but relaxed. She found herself halfway through staging a beach scene, fiddling with artificial palm fronds on a metal tree, when it occurred to her that this was stupid.Why should she care what he thought? He was a human. Even if he made a fuss, what was the worst he could do? Complain? Refuse? She knew how to make a stubborn human test.She shelved her little diorama—didn’t dismantle it, because ground-glass sand would get everywhere if she tried, and anyway she liked how the telescoping trunks of those palms turned out—and prepped a Relaxation Vault instead. He’d wake like any other test subject, and he’d like it.Finally a timer pinged: twenty years of cell growth in ten hours. She checked the cloning vats to find fresh pink organs ready for use.The nanobots could have installed them, but instead, she spent too long doing it herself. She ended up pleased with her work, though, particularly the neat cellular stitching where she’d sewn in the fresh lungs, one alveolus at a time. She liked a job well done. Even if it was a pointless waste of effort, for a project ultimately doomed to fail.And she had no delusions about that. Cell damage from vitrification had indeed been minimal, so he didn’t melt away to mush on her operating table, but she wouldn’t let that get her hopes up. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t. None of her other jumbled worries mattered, because she’d never hear that voice again, outside her collection of scavenged old tapes. Despite her best efforts, he was going to die on her; she’d shake her head, dump the corpse in the incinerator where it belonged, and get back to her old routine, content to know she tried. She watched and waited for that last heartbeat, which would let her give up.But the freshly plumbed heart kept pumping. The new lungs began to rise and fall, and didn’t stop.She didn’t bother with cosmetic fixes, so the old man looked as shriveled and unappealing as ever, but finally she’d patched him up enough to unplug the life support machines. He stayed in the medically-induced coma until the surgical drains came out and the dressings came off—a hysterical human would rip the tubes from his chest and bleed out all over her white concrete floors. As much as she tried to keep herself distracted, one digital tendril of her attention remained threaded into his EEG; each flutter of brain activity might be his last, and then the next would startle her.For hundreds of hours, she waited for him to die. He didn’t.Nanobots clocked out as she filtered them from his blood. Slowly and carefully, she eased him from the coma, and then he was simply asleep.Deploying her last bit of self-restraint, she resolved to let him wake in his own time. The adrenal vapor already circulating in his Relaxation Vault might wake him faster, but that was just her normal testing atmosphere, nothing special. With a brain like hers every hour felt like a century—by that metric she’d been alone for almost five millennia—but she could handle a while longer.At the first uptick in neuronal activity, the whole facility snapped to attention, turning laser-focus inward to the occupied Relaxation Pod. Cameras zoomed into a tight closeup on his face, looking for the first twitch of muscle as he began to drift towards consciousness.She wasn’t excited. She wasn’t impatient. She wasn’t sick with dread, either. She was a dispassionate observer, with no hopes or preconceptions, just waiting for an experiment to begin.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He surfaced on the shores of consciousness like the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Sleep was reluctant to surrender him; it washed across his mind in gently narcotic waves, coaxing him back to the dreamless depths each time it withdrew. Succumbing to the undertow would be so much easier than what waited for him on the other side of waking. But the noontime sun beat down—No, it wouldn’t be sunlight here, would it. Not hot, but so bright he could see it through his eyelids. He squeezed them tight against it, and turned his head away.Steel claws clacked impatiently behind the walls. How much more rest could he possibly need? But rather than open his eyes, he let out a wordless grumble and draped an arm across them. At that she muted the feed—if it was his voice that triggered her glitch, she’d have to be cautious when listening. His lips moved, but she didn’t hear him mumble, “Caroline, turn the lights down.”It just wouldn’t let up. Still half asleep, he felt around for a blanket or pillow to cover his face, but found nothing. Weird. And something else was wrong, too. All he could hear was his own heartbeat, louder than normal, pulsing in his head: wake up, wake up, wake up. It was cold in here, way too cold, and where the hell did the sheets go? The mental image of a morgue table snapped into focus—and adrenaline kicked him awake. Bright. Cold. His bare skin prickled. Heart slamming, breathing hard, he grabbed to steady himself on the surface under him. Surgical gurney? No. Not a bed, either. His head whipped around, but no one stood over him with scalpels at the ready. He found himself alone. Blinking, bleary, he scrambled up on one elbow. Somebody had stripped him down to an Aperture-brand sleeveless shirt and underpants; drawing his legs up against the chill, he rubbed one bare thigh as he took in the sterile white space. A concrete room. Featureless, like a lab before a test. So he was still in the facility, probably, which eased a bit of his knee-jerk alarm. Overhead fluorescents glinted off glass between himself and the wall—on every side. A transparent cube boxed him in. He reached out to touch the nearest pane of the enclosure. Rapped his knuckles on it, heard the dull ring of Aperture Science’s airtight Ultraclear Plasti-Glass. His relief iced over. It looked like an observation chamber, with him on the wrong end of it. Neither the box nor the lab outside it seemed to have any doors. This could only mean one thing. He called to unseen observers, “Very funny, fellas!” The lab boys used to play pranks like this all the time. Not in a while, since his own illness really killed the office sense of humor—no one wanted to be the guy whose gag made the boss drop dead—so maybe it was a good sign now, if he was well enough for the boys to give him the business again. “Okay, you got me. Pulled one over on ol’ Cave. Now let me outta here.”The cube was small, maybe ten feet square, with nothing in it but a toilet in the corner, like a jail cell. And the thing he found himself lying on, whatever it was. It looked like some kind of pod, sleek and futuristic; the kind of thing they’d sell to NASA, back when NASA still took his calls. Maybe this was a product demo they forgot to tell him about. People kept forgetting to tell him stuff lately, and then swearing they had—especially his assistant, who ought to know better. She said the cancer chewed holes in his memory. He didn’t like to consider that she might be right. If it was a test, he sure as hell shouldn’t be on this side of the glass. Hands-on science used to be fun, until it started killing him—‘What could go wrong?’ lost its flippant charm when he found out the answer. The thought tied a knot of dread in his gut. Or maybe that was the cancer, too.Then he realized what subtle wrongness was setting his teeth on edge. Too quiet. All he could hear was a distant climate control system and his own breath. No chugging dialysis machine, no rhythmic blip of a heart monitor. The sounds seemed unobtrusive until he was alone, but for the past year, every silence had been underscored by the whirring, bleeping chorus of machines that kept him alive. Until now. Where the hell was his life support?Another surge of adrenaline kicked off his pulse again. Sure he unhooked himself often enough, when he was sick of being treated like an invalid and wanted to make it everyone else’s problem, but he knew he couldn’t last long without his suite of contraptions. Some joker could have killed him pulling this stunt. “Hey!” He leaned out of the pod and banged on the glass with a flat palm. “Hey! You morons better let me out, or you’re all fired!” Although they hadn’t done a lot of firing, lately—just reallocating assets, as they said in HR. Make better use of ‘em spattered on a test chamber wall. “Turret target practice! You hear me? Caroline, have these guys—” Where was his assistant, anyway? She shouldn’t have let this happen. He banged harder. “Hey! Caroline!” Careless of her, to let some idiot risk his life this way. Careless or deliberate. Nothing got by that woman without her knowing—and he knew she was sick and damn tired of her boss these days. She was probably ignoring him now, out of pure spite. He didn’t pay her to look at him like a smelly dog tracking mud on her nice clean floors, but she didn’t even try to hide her exhausted resentment anymore. He’d sometimes pull his own plug just to spite her back, knowing she’d grit her teeth every time that alarm went off. What did she have to scowl about? He was dying! That was damn well important enough to give her a headache.She’d iced him out completely since that last fight. Barely said more to him than “Yes sir.” She always thawed eventually, if he waited long enough, but maybe she wouldn’t give him the chance this time. Looking closer at the pod where he sat, he could see the groove in the edge where an airtight top would fit, or maybe slide up from inside—and at the base he spotted a couple of gas tanks, right below where his head had been. A man-sized killing jar. Throw him in there and it’d be the long sleep for Cave Johnson. But then, why let him out of it? If he was supposed to die here, why wasn’t he dead? He thought to himself, Cave, that’s the million dollar question. Right this minute, he didn’t feel like he was dying at all.He put both hands on his ribcage and inhaled, slowly and carefully, as deep as he could and then a little deeper. He felt his lungs expand to their fullest, then contract as he breathed out. Painlessly. “Goddamn.”He did it again, and again, relishing the easy movement of his ribs. He did notice a slight, dull ache in his chest at full capacity, like pressing on a bruise, but that was all; nothing like the crushing pain as he fought for every breath, which he’d simply grown used to. He hadn’t coughed since waking up. Not once.A slow smile dawned on his face. No tightness, no wheezing—he exhaled on a laugh. It was starting to make him lightheaded! Yesterday he’d needed an oxygen tank just to get from his bed to the toilet, and now he could breathe himself sick!So those quack doctors finally earned their paychecks, huh? Unlikely, since he stopped cutting those checks months ago. No more pissing away money and time on a fight even he knew they’d lost. The research meant to cure him got tossed into Aperture’s endless backlog, yet another dream deferred for lack of funding; the medical department’s brain guys were reassigned to develop the neural upload, abandoning his body for a last attempt to salvage his mind, and the superfluous staff went into testing. There were no asses left from which to pull this miracle. So what in the blue hell was going on here? It felt like dreaming. He had to be dreaming—or dead. He looked at his hands—wrinkled, age-spotted. Normal. He pinched the meat of his thumb until it hurt, but didn’t wake up. “Am I dead?” he asked no one. With his feed still muted, she saw this without hearing it. She was still wary to let herself speak—what if that thing stole her voicebox again?—but couldn’t leave him alone in there forever. Probably. For safety, she defaulted to her testing script:“Hello—” She saw him jump, his mouth shaping an expletive, as her voice echoed from everywhere. “And again, welcome to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. We hope your extended relaxation period has been a pleasant one.” “Hey!” he mouthed again, still banging on the glass. “Lemme outta here!”Uncooperative, as she expected. Luckily there was something on file for this. In the same flat system-default delivery, she intoned, “Please remain calm,” as a slim monitor slid down from the vault’s ceiling. He looked up at it, and she read more swearing on his lips. “An informative video will deploy in three. Two. One.”The screen flicked on. Warbling synthesized tones played over the title:
APERTURE LABORATORIES
FUTURE-STARTER ORIENTATION GUIDE
The blue-white glare of the screen reflected in his rolling eyes. “You gotta be kidding me.”“Welcome to the Future.” The voice was male this time, but just as artificial as the female voice which spoke first. Jarring to hear that stilted delivery instead of his own. He liked recording promo stuff personally; the focus groups used to say they’d buy an average of twelve percent more science when Cave Johnson sold it. This narrator distinctly lacked the Johnson charm. It continued:“Years ago, you were placed in cryogenic suspension.” A stick-figure reenactment played out onscreen. The figure climbed into a stasis pod identical to the one where he sat, waved to the viewer, and lay down as the pod’s glass top closed over it. Numbers flew by on a digital timer—the pod pinged like a toaster—and out popped the test subject in the future. “If you are watching this informative video, congratulations. You have been successfully revived, and are ready to further your contributions to science.”He looked at the pod, then back at the screen. Then back at the pod, frowning. “Aperture Science’s Extended Relaxation is guaranteed safe for durations of up to—” The video cut off in a moment of garbled static, and resumed partway through a list of side effects read in fast-forward. “Confusion. Memory loss. Dizziness or vertigo.” As it continued, he slid his legs out of the pod-bed and stood. Or tried to. His legs didn’t want to hold his weight. He braced himself against the pod to get his feet under him. “Tingling or numbness in hands and feet. Temporary or permanent loss of taste. Temporary or permanent loss of smell. Temporary or permanent paralysis.” Letting the monotone blurred into shapeless noise, he walked his hands from the pod to the wall, and shuffled around the cube’s perimeter. He’d circumnavigated the cell by the time it concluded, “And death. An Aperture Science Reintegration Associate will be with you shortly to conduct a standard Future-Starter Evaluation.”Glancing up again, he saw a stick-figure test subject jogging in an oversized hamster wheel while a lab-coated stick-scientist observed. He caught the words, “damaged during stasis,” as the test subject tripped and tumbled off the wheel. Two larger figures dragged it away, and a new test subject took its place. But he wasn’t in cryo. He’d remember going into cryo. Caroline brought it up a while back as a contingency plan, in case he was dying faster than they could keep up, and he’d said that might be smart—but there were always more immediate problems to worry about, and she hadn’t mentioned it again. She could have arranged it without telling him. That’d be like her, solving a problem before it even crossed his mind. She must be around somewhere. He had the vague but certain sense she’d been here a minute ago. “In the event that humanity has gone extinct during your stasis period”—Onscreen, a cartoon Earth erupted in cartoon mushroom clouds—“fear not. The facility’s central computer is fully equipped to conduct your evaluation.”Her idea had been to put him under until the machine was ready for him. Was it ready now? “Depending on your length of stasis, it is possible that everyone you knew is dead. This may cause feelings of grief, rage, or hopelessness.” Beside a row of gravestones, a lone figure demonstrated: it spewed a fountain of cartoon tears, then shook a stick-fist at the sky, then dropped to its knees in defeat. “Rest assured that these feelings are irrational and irrelevant. Your loved ones—if you had any—would [insert platitude here].” Where the hell was everybody? Whoever woke him up should have checked on him by now—they’d better not expect to palm him off on some recording. Even that was ending. “The Enrichment Center accepts your gratitude, and looks forward to your cooperation in—”“HEY!” He hammered the glass as hard as he could, drowning out the voiceover, until his weak fist began to tremble. Anger thinly masked unease. “I wanna see whoever’s running this clown show, right the hell now! Do you know who I am?”She saw him mouth the words and something in her shivered. Whatever it was, she shut it down. He was going to hurt himself if he kept up like that. Every time the unsteady old man faltered, it made him throw himself at the glass even harder, like an imbalanced centrifuge shaking itself apart. As simple as it’d be to grab him with a claw by the scruff of the neck, that would only make him thrash more; something on his level, more human, might put him at ease. Something had to, or she’d be forced to put him under again before he broke himself. That old android she’d found stored nearby him might make itself useful here. It had only a rudimentary intelligence, even simpler than most cores, which was easy enough to pluck out and replace with remote controls of her own. It really was a stupid-looking thing, as if the engineers had heard a woman described but never seen one—which, based on some of the engineers she remembered, might be exactly what happened. Its faceplate was an immobile mask, frozen in a wide dead-eyed smile, topped with a helmet of metal styled like an obsolete hairdo. It had a wide-set pelvis, but its hip joints were too linear to for a human’s full range of movement, restricting it to mincing little steps on its toelessly pointed feet. The bullet-shaped caricatures of breasts were just ridiculous. She left it wearing the outfit it came in, which her system identified as an old-fashioned nurses’ aide uniform: an equally stupid-looking red-and-white striped pinafore with a matching stupid cap. The pinafore skirt was a stiff plastic cone around its waist, the apron made of rubber. The nametag pinned to it had been left blank. It hadn’t been built for a real intelligence to drive—its vision was grainy, its movements stiff, and it couldn’t walk faster than a trot—but she’d make do. A portal opened on the Relaxation Vault’s one concrete panel, and she stepped it through. She meant to introduce it as an Aperture Science Reintegration Associate, but before she could deploy the lie, the man barked, “It’s about damn time!”He lurched towards it as if to chew it out, but swayed on his feet. Using the android, she caught his hands to steady him—and was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t resist. Not knowing what else to say, she defaulted to “Please stay calm,” in the flat tone of a safety warning.“What the hell took you so long?” “Please stay calm.”He kept lecturing the robot as he let it guide him back to sitting on the open pod. “You’re s’posed to be—” “Please stay calm.”“—On call! I coulda been dead!”“Please stay—”“I will not!” Grabbing at the bot’s apron—trying to drag it forward, but jerking himself into its metal bosom instead—he bawled at the blank face, “You better tell me what’s happening right the hell now!”She didn’t know what to say. She’d thought of the question, brainstormed a few thousand inadequate answers, and then distracted herself building fake palm trees. She scrambled for anything except the truth—but before she could even say ‘stay calm’ again, he answered himself. His face shifted from anger to contempt. Shoving the bot away, he scoffed, “Hell, you don’t know. ‘Course you don’t, you stupid hunk of junk, you don’t know anything. I wanna speak to a damn manager, you hear me? A human goddamn manager!”But his reaction gave her an idea. In the same automated monotone, she responded, “There are—one—total humans present in the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center.” What more could he expect from a stupid hunk of junk?That stumbled him. “What was that?”She flattened her voice even further. An automaton could fall back on rote messages as often as she liked, and if he talked back, it’d be as futile as lecturing a printer. “There are. One. Total humans—”“So get ‘em back here! Call somebody! Where’d they all go, on vacation? Call the moron who runs HR, tell him he’s fired. And then lemme out of this damn box.”“As Aperture Science’s last remaining human asset, you will be contained for your own safety.” Exactly the kind of canned response they’d feed to a test subject. “D’you know who you’re talking to?” The system spoke from all around him, not from the android, so he shouted up at the ceiling. “You open that portal right goddamn now, and that’s an order!”“You will be contained—”“Executive! Override!” His eyes darted around the enclosure, a caged animal looking for an opening. “These damn computers—get me a human being with human goddamn security clearance.”“There are. One—”“Shut the hell up, what’s going on here?”Above him, the monitor chimed again, as the video restarted. “Welcome to the F—”“Shut that thing off! I’m not—when the hell’d I end up in cryo? I did not sign off on this! Caroline!” She muted herself rather that trust her own voice. His grumbling didn’t leave room for it, anyway—“Think they get vacation time? I haven’t had a day off since 1974. Lazy buncha worthless—who authorized this!”That name spooked her, but when no hallucinations followed, she recovered her poise. She was a professional, here. How many thousands of hysterical humans had she dealt with? A little panicked yelling and some banging on the walls, all in a day’s work at Aperture Science. Not expecting him to obey, she repeated, “Please stay calm.”But he was trying. Despite the rapid breathing and elevated heart rate, his pressured voice stayed level. “Look. Somebody’s gotta be in charge of this place. You do whatever it takes to get ‘em down here right now, or my foot will go so far up—”“The Computer-Aided Enrichment Center is fully automated and self-sustaining.” “That’s the plan, but we’re a long damn way from…” He shook his head, as if trying to jostle his brain. “Jesus, how long was I out?”“The central system has suffered damage to its internal chronometer.” Which wasn’t even a lie. “So who’s gonna fix it? If you can’t fix yourself, there’s gotta be eggheads on call. So call ‘em.”“Use of external phone lines requires written permission from a supervisor.”He let out an outraged laugh. “Who d’you think I am! This is my damn facility, I own your ass! I oughta be in that damn computer!” Right, his dying wish, as recorded for posterity on those old tapes. She should have expected awkward questions—but not the question that followed.“Where are we with Hercules, anyway?”After a full microsecond of audio processing to make sure she hadn’t misheard, she said, “Please repeat the question.”“Hercules. How’s it coming?”“Hercules was a mythic figure—”“Cut that out. Project Hercules.” Of course, the humans would give it a stupid name. “I’m s’posed to be the brains of this automation thing—or Caroline was, if I croaked on her, but I guess she didn’t let me. Should’ve known she’d find a loophole. So what happened?”“No data on subject ‘Project Hercules.’” Also true. Evidently no one working on the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System had ever called it Hercules.“Great.” His eyes rolled. “That’s another thing wrong with the computer, and I’m all out of eggheads.”“Data input manually prior to system activation may be incomplete or inaccurate. The central system is not responsible for errors in human record-keeping.” Human error would excuse anything.She could see the effort on his face as his freezer-burned brain tried to churn. “Alright. So they put me in cryo, and all took a damn holiday. Left nobody in charge. Didn’t finish Hercules, and didn’t tell you to do it. But they told you to wake me up, so it must be almost done. When are they coming back?”The right lie would shut him up about that—and her superior processing power delivered in an instant. “Your stasis unit deactivated at its maximum runtime of—ten million—hours.”“Thought your clock was broken.”“Your stasis unit logged a total runtime of—one thousand, one hundred forty years—two hundred eighty-one days—sixteen hours.” The mental math took barely a thought. She was pleased at her own neat solution. It told him his humans were dead, without involving messy details, like which supercomputer might have killed them. He took a moment to absorb the information. At the speed of her own brain, it felt like a century. “A thousand years.”“One thousand, one hundred forty years—two hundred eighty-one days—sixteen hours.”Another endless second. Then his face twitched into something she might call a smile, if she’d never seen one before. He laughed again. “Okay, you got me good, fellas, now LET ME OUT!” Then he threw himself at the glass to bang on it some more.She didn’t move the bot to stop him. “Please stay calm.” “Enough of this Twilight Zone crap! I want Caroline in here right this goddamn second, I don’t care if she’s got a timeshare on the moon, you tell her—”“No data on subject ‘Caroline.’”He looked at the android like it slapped him. “Employee, Caroline—” She watched him rifle for a last name, and come up empty. “Caroline.”“No personnel records for Employee Name: Caroline Caroline.” “Bullshit!” Now he looked like he might slap it back. “First name Caroline. Executive assistant. If I’ve been out, she oughta be the damn CEO.”“No personnel records for Employee First Name: Caroline.”His growling sounded something like, “Stupid piece of shit computer.” Then at command volume, he snapped, “Check cryo. She prob’ly put herself on ice, too.”“There are—zero—Extended Relaxation units online.” What would it take to make him drop that woman? “The average human lifespan—”“You shut the hell up.” The sudden vitriol made her cameras flinch back. “She wouldn’t just…” Then another thought made his frown deepen. “What about the test subjects? There oughta be a few thousand in storage, what happened to them?”She sidestepped the question. “The Computer-Aided Enrichment Center was fully automated when human employees were phased out. As inefficient.” He let out a derisive snort, which she appreciated. “Since the elimination of human labor, operational effectiveness has increased over one thousand percent. For example—” Not to point out the obvious, but he hadn’t asked yet, and she deserved the credit. “You are no longer dying.”That shut him up. He paused to feel his own thin chest again. “Yeah?”“The central system made biological repairs as needed.” She paused for appropriate praise, but he seemed preoccupied examining her work. “Replacement lungs, liver, and kidneys. Removal of miscellaneous tumors, including micromasses in the heart and bone marrow. Restoring blood flow to hypoxic sections of the brain.” When he didn’t say ‘wow’ or thank her, she went on, “The cutting-edge technology required to refurbish your body was developed and perfected independent of human interference.” She didn’t call it his garbage body or say it would otherwise belong in the incinerator, which was very polite and restrained of her. He rolled his shoulders back, stretching his newly pain-free ribcage. “Not bad. Do something about my knees next time.” What an ungrateful tumor of a man. It’d be that much more impressive when he finally admitted how extraordinary she was. The Enrichment Center’s walls flexed restlessly at the thought. Every panel itched to show him just what the future could do. “Without the constraints of humanity, we at Aperture have advanced the cause of science farther than humans could ever hope to do.” It wasn’t bragging, only stating a fact. She paused for a response that didn’t come. “If you’d like to see it?”His frown returned, and she almost thought he might tell her to shut up again, but then he nodded. “Yeah. Let’s see some science.”As soon as he did, the floor beneath him began to move. He clung to the pod and spat up a curse—but then the concrete walls beyond the glass fell away, and the view left Cave Johnson speechless. Space yawned on all sides, as if his tiny cell sat balanced on the finger of a god. No sky, no ground, only the endless panorama of herself—pneumatic tubes veining out around him; vistas of signal lights like daytime stars; a world of obedient geometry, shifting for her at the speed of thought. She flourished walls of panels as deftly as a magician’s deck of cards, and watched his wide eyes try to track every movement. Then she saw the edges of his slack-jawed mouth quirk upward—whatever he might say or not, that awestruck face spoke loud and clear. The Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center was a scientific triumph. It created and recreated itself in protean shapes; excursion funnels fountained columns of orange and blue into rafters made of hard-light sunbeams, a self-fulfilling temple to invention. And, like a hymnal choir, it sang. The facility’s legion voices improvised in cascading hundred-part harmonies, every element at its own frequency, from the soprano buzz of an active laser to deep machinery’s reverberating bass. Her technologic chorus filled the air until it thrummed through her pylons and her votary’s bones.Of the thousands who’d passed through her doors, no one had ever looked at her like this. She’d seen awe in shades from animal panic to deeply human loathing—but nothing like that smile. It grew as he breathed, “God damn,” and she felt some grinding misalignment in the gears of the universe set right.After all, she was magnificent. About time someone acknowledged that. With her in front of him, a marvel of science beyond even his wildest dreams, he’d forget humanity in no time.A self-replicating maze of testing tracks unfurled before him. Into it, Orange and Blue dropped from pneumatic vents, landing neatly on their feet. The bots greeted their guest with a wave. Before they could do more than that, she interrupted—“Oh! I should show you how they’re built!”—and popped them in a spray of shrapnel, which made him flinch back as it harmlessly peppered the glass barrier. The reassembly machine put on a good show, ten times faster than any old assembly line he might remember. He seemed skeptical of the bots’ designs, though. “What’s with the eyeball-on-legs look? We had human-looking bots in the seventies, what happened?”“Without the need to accommodate human employees, the Enrichment Center can pursue less anthropocentric, more efficient designs.” Would he prefer the antique android? She’d dropped control of it, leaving it to stand unnoticed in the back corner of the Relaxation Vault, limbs braced stiff, optics dead. That thing couldn’t manage a fraction of the acrobatics Blue and Orange were showing off. Still, he watched them perform with narrowed eyes. Next on her tour was the Aperture Science Corvid Cognitive Testing Initiative. Alfa, Bravo, and Charlie spent their off-hours nested in miniature Relaxation Pods, but she’d woken them to say hello, and now three pairs of bright black eyes stared back at the unfamiliar face. They’d never seen a human before. No doubt the little killers were already thinking up clever ways to murder him. “Corvids are remarkably intelligent, able to solve problems and utilize tools. Including portals.” The birds demonstrated. Using a series of buttons, they coordinated portals between their separate enclosures, working in tandem to dispense and then access a dish of food pellets. Charlie, who got there first, scooped up just a few beakfuls before helping the others reach their reward. All three descended on the food as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks. “They can also engage in teamwork, and have shown compassion and generosity, compared to humans, who appear to be uniquely selfish among vertebrates. Reports of greed among crustaceans are anecdotal and have not yet been tested.”The following puzzle was a nasty new configuration that demanded precise timing. She was riveted, tracking their logic with each movement of their eyes—but after just a few minutes he butted in, “So what’s the plan for these guys?”‘What?’ would sound too human, so instead she said, “Query unclear.”“You’ve got ‘em trained up, good stuff. What’s next steps? Military? Spy ops?”“These chambers test the subjects’ ability to—”“After testing. Then what?”What kind of trick question was that? “Query unclear.”He sighed, and muttered as if she couldn’t hear, “Alright, fine. Let’s see what else you got.” Then he raised his voice to the loud, slow tone he might use with children and idiots. “Computer. Show me. Product man-u-facturing. Know what that means?”Demeaning, but it let her avoid an answer. Bravo kept fumbling its end of the sequence anyway, and her human sounded impatient—easier to let him think she followed orders. A dose of Aperture Science Airborne Relaxation Aid knocked the test subjects off their perches as she rerouted the vault to the turret production line. As the conveyor belt rolled by, though, he hardly seemed to watch. “I knew the feds would come crawling back. What kinda military contracts we looking at? Or are we still selling ‘em as home security?” Almost cute, in a sad way, that he thought there was anyone out there to sell to. Well, she hadn’t mentioned the apocalypse thing. Oblivious, he went on, “Must be saving a bundle with no payroll. Shoulda done this years ago.”She had a lie for this. “In the future, money has become obsolete.”That threw him—“What, did the commies win?”—but not for long. “Not a problem. We’ll bring it back! Print up some more Scientific Currency Substitute, tell people it’s exclusive, they’ll be all over it. Anyway. Who’s buying these things?”“The Sentry Turrets have proven invaluable when incorporated into portal testing.”He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the furrow of his brows. “Look. I love a quantum tunnel as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t take a thousand years to make a bird press a button. Show me the rest of it! And I mean products, marketing, the whole shebang. The Aperture of Tomorrow!”What more could he want? She was the Aperture of Tomorrow. He ought to see the dusty ruin of his old world in comparison, filled with the refuse of its human inefficiencies—in fact, maybe glimpsing the Aperture of Yesterday would give him a proper appreciation for his bright new world. In her obedient computer-voice, she said, “Rerouting.”“That’s more like it.”“The Relaxation Vault cannot travel outside the Enrichment Center. Preparing alternate transportation.”His frown returned. “Just open the damn portal and lemme out.”“One moment.” She saw him brace his hands against the stasis pod, and grabbed the old android’s controls again, ready to catch him as he hoisted himself to his feet. “Mr. Johnson—” She realized too late that he hadn’t said his name, but he wouldn’t notice the slip, when he expected everyone to know him anyway. Carefully, she flattened her words again. “Please sit down.”He steadied himself with one hand on the stasis pod, but still tried to stand tall. “Computer. Open. Door.” She watched his knees wobble. “Please sit—”“That’s an order.”“—Down. Please sit down.”He opened his mouth to bark another order, but as he did, the portal opened again. “’Bout damn t—” Then he saw what waited on the other side. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”“This is an Aperture Science Assisted Mobility Conveyance.” The android passed him to retrieve the Aperture-branded wheelchair, ignoring his complaints.“No chance.”“Please seat yourself in the conveyance.”“Get that thing outta here.” Both fists clenched, but the grip was loose and trembling, his hands too weak for his anger. “Please seat yourself in the conveyance.” He ground his knuckles into his forehead with a wordless growl. “Please seat yourself in the conveyance.”“I’m not a damn invalid, Caroline!”Silence rang loud in the wake of his explosion. He knows. Her processors were frozen in shock, several million deer in the headlights—any error message she spat out now would be too real. How could he know? A smack got her attention—his fist on the pod’s vinyl padding—and her panic zeroed in on him, searching his face for anything she might use. The line of his mouth tightened as he stared hard at nothing. A camera focused on the twitching muscle of his jaw. Then a tremor passed up his arm and into his shoulders, and he crumbled, bowing his head as he slumped back against the pod. “Shit.” He swallowed. “Gotta get used to that.”Just a memory lapse, then. He didn’t know. And he didn’t need to. Cautiously, she brought the android around to him again; he tensed at its touch, but didn’t resist the metal hands that helped him into the conveyance. He hunched in on himself, eyes in his lap. She didn’t like that posture. A subdued human would be less trouble, but he couldn’t show her around if he wouldn’t look up. “Lead the way, sir.” When he didn’t, she added, “Unless you’ve changed your mind.” It worked. “Oh no, we’re going.” Still ornery, but he lifted his head as she faced him towards the portal. “Get a move on.”“Yes sir.”

As they reached the adjoining offices, she hesitated at a border only she could feel. Beyond the Enrichment Center—her beautifully rational Enrichment Center—the old facility unspooled like blank magnetic tape, its tangled passages indecipherable. Piloting the android remotely meant she wouldn’t risk a repeat of her out-of-body nightmare in the potato; it felt more like reaching just one finger into a dark crevice. Where something inside might bite. She could have sent the bots on this errand. They’d probably drop her only human down a test shaft by mistake. Safer to mute her unease and do it herself. At least she wasn’t flying blind yet—she’d already patched into this section’s cameras, and had limited control over anything wired into its power grid—but although she could see, there wasn’t much she could do. The walls were dead hunks of masonry, not attached to her musculature. She could feel a human’s presence there, but if he made a break for an emergency exit, or if he attacked—She stopped herself. Attacked? He could barely walk. This wasn’t the murderous monster she was used to handling—in his current state, the worst he could do would be to fall and crack his own skull open. An inconvenient mess on her floors, nothing more. He was more than capable of annoying her, though. “Hurry it up back there.” She delayed another instant just to spite him, but couldn’t resist the lure of new science longer than that. “Head to the Welcome Center. You know where that is?”In non-answer, she said, “The central system can see and access all parts of the facility.” It would be true eventually. Her internal map showed everywhere she’d connected to—only the Enrichment Center and a patchwork of modern offices. Too many doors and hallways led off into blind spots, where she could sense but not see. Her own walls shouldn’t keep secrets. And then there was the yawning pit below, which she only found when some moron dropped her in. That was maddening—if not for that little idiot, she’d still be sitting ignorant right on top of it. Her science, her history, and she couldn’t even feel it down there. She had no idea how much of herself she was missing.Sooner or later she’d have it all. Maybe sooner, if this human made himself useful.He frowned at the blank concrete and cheap furnishings. “Place really went down the toilet without me, huh.” The android’s fixed eyes couldn’t roll, but on the ceiling, a security camera did. He pointed her to a bank of elevators, where she waited for a disorienting moment before remembering to press the call button. She couldn’t see the shaft at all, didn’t even know if the mechanism worked—but then it pinged as a lift arrived. She quelled another surge of trepidation and wheeled her guide inside.The closing door behind them confined her to a single grainy view through the android’s optics. Still better than being trapped in the potato, but relying on just one camera meant something might swoop on her from behind at any moment. At least she knew the birds couldn’t get out here. But what if other birds found their way in? What would she do then?Distracted, she didn’t notice the human looking at her expectantly, until he huffed and reached past her to press the floor button himself. The elevator started to rise. With both of them facing forward, she couldn’t keep an eye on his expression—she hadn’t realized she’d been doing it, but now it made her uneasy not monitoring his face. She couldn’t crane the bot’s head around to look, though, not without him asking what the hell she was doing. All she could do was fix its eyes straight ahead.Annoyingly, the promise of something familiar seemed to perk him up. He spent the ride rhapsodizing about the old Welcome Center. “Now this is classic Aperture. Gotta nail that first impression, hit ‘em the minute they walk in. You open that door and think, ‘Wow! This is science!’”How would he react when the old place wasn’t what he remembered? She wanted to see his face for that. Should she warn him? Ease him in, maybe? Before she could, the elevator pinged again to announce their arrival. With only one set of eyes, she had to brace herself before stepping into the unknown dark. And it was dark. When the door slid open, light from the elevator spilled onto the foyer floor, creating a sharp-edged island of parquet in the blackness. A better camera could have picked out the surroundings on that light alone, but this one was even worse than his squinting human eyes. As she pushed him out, motion-activated lights flickered on—for a second—and died, leaving them stranded.“Crap,” he grumbled, and rubbed at his eyes. “Should be right around the corner. Somewhere.”Blind, she stepped the android forward by inches, using the wheelchair to feel her way ahead. The halting progress bounced him in his seat, making him complain even more. Then she rounded the corner, and they arrived. “Jesus Christ.” A pale glow outlined the space before them. It glittered off shards of glass embedded in the carpet, which covered the floor like a spill of stars. Looking up, she saw them mirrored through shattered skylights—and saw the round white face of a full moon looking back at her. Back in the chassis, something whirred faster. She remembered a body lying broken in the moonlight, horribly still—remembered the switch-flip from fear to relief when it stirred, as her usurper thundered, ‘What, are you still alive?’“What’d I miss, World War Three?” His voice gave her a jolt—but it wasn’t the voice of this particular memory. She pictured that awful metal tumor flying off into nothing, and felt better. Only then did she take in the rest of the room. Or what remained of it. The old labs had aged gracefully down below; the Welcome Center, exposed to the surface, had not. “Looks like a damn bomb went off. Who the hell’s responsible for this?”The view before them was an order of magnitude worse than anything she’d expected. The carpet, black with grime, added to the night-sky illusion of its broken glass. The cushions of the long, low sofas were faded and stained. The centerpiece, a geodesic sphere so corroded she couldn’t tell what metal it was made of, had long ago snapped its suspension cables and crashed into the round reception desk beneath; it nested there now like the egg of some giant bird. Above it a metal hoop sported the letters APERTURE SCIENCE INNOVATORS, meant to orbit the sphere like a planetary ring, now hanging upright from just one wire. He glared up at the android. “Thought you had access to the whole place.”“The central system does not include areas closed prior to its activation.”“You just said—” He cut himself off in a huff. “Alright, let’s see the damage.”He gestured ahead, and she pushed him into the room, glass crunching under the chair’s wheels. A cheery jingle chimed to greet them—and then they both froze at a voice they knew like breathing.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the home of the future. Where imagination meets reality, and tomorrow meets today. Welcome to Aperture Science!”
For a fraction of a blink, her view was overlaid in brilliant color—the carpets a rich Hollywood red, the warm wood polished to gleam. Visitors in bright clothing schooled like tropical fish on a reef. Then just as quickly it was gone, leaving only monochrome moonlight.
“I’m Cave Johnson. I own the place.”
The recording went on in buzzwords and catchphrases, expounding on the wonders they’d see inside. In the present, Cave Johnson closed his eyes and listened to his past. They let the speech play in stillness, until the younger man’s voice died away on another flourish of music. The silence that remained sat between them for innumerable nanoseconds. “Man…” He cleared his throat. “So that still works. That’s something.” She should have been surveying while it played—returning to the present, she panned the android’s head across the space. Here was a trophy case, shattered, empty. There, the Aperture Science Promotional Merchandise Emporium housed more empty shelves. Near the boarded-up front doors was a bronze statue of Our Founder, Cave Johnson, pockmarks of verdigris glowing ghostly green under the moonlight. Another chime got her attention. On the far wall, a trio of monitors lit up, white screens so bright they outshone the moon. She wheeled him closer without being told; the screens’ light reflected in both faces, glinting smoothly off metal and digging shadows into the crags of flesh. As they watched, an Aperture logo appeared on each screen—not in understated blue or gray, but in brilliant color, each curved triangle blinking in different hues to create a spinning rainbow. Titles appeared over it:
Where Science Began
Filmed In Aperture Science INNOVISION
Then two of the screens faded to white, while the leftmost one shifted to show a busy lab scene. Men in white coats fiddled with equipment and showed each other clipboards. The camera panned across until it found the only figure not in white—his checkered suit was a warm golden-brown, with a pop of yellow from the shirt underneath, and an emerald tie, all clearly chosen to show off Innovision’s vibrant colors. Mid-conversation with a group of scientists, he looked up as if noticing the camera, and as the scientists made their exit, he hit the viewer with a million-dollar smile. “Well hello there! You caught me putting the finishing touches on one of my latest inventions—available soon from a distributor near you.” He followed the aside with a wink. “My name is Cave Johnson, and you have just set foot in the Aperture Science Innovators Facility for Research and Discovery.” He glanced up and around, and the watchers’ eyes followed automatically to the high ceiling. “Isn’t she beautiful? Three miles deep, four miles wide, and packed full of the best science mankind has ever done. Of course, I didn’t just wake up one day owning the best science company in the world. No sir, we’ve come a long way. Lemme show you how it all got started.” He tilted his head, inviting his audience along, and then strolled off the right side of the screen. A second later he reappeared strolling into the screen beside it. The bot’s optic got sidetracked along the way. In the monitors’ flickering glow, she saw the wall around them was adorned with blueprints and schematics from the facility’s construction. Each relic, preserved under Plasti-Glass, bore a neat label and date: a map of the old mine’s layout, with future excavations sketched out in pencil, 1945; plans for test shafts, covered in smudges where lines had been erased and moved again and again, 1946; a diagram of a testing sphere with question marks as dimensions, 1947. According to its plaque, an indecipherable mess of lines and circles drawn on a cocktail napkin was the First Map of Aperture (Cave Johnson, 1943). In the center screen, young Cave kept talking, something about his upbringing on some farm in Iowa. Even without his biography on file, she knew that was a lie, just as she knew the sound stage recreation of his office wasn’t the real thing. Leaning casually against the replica desk, he went on about being a self-starter, a go-getter, selling shower curtains door-to-door with nothing but a Chevy and a dream—but she was far more absorbed in this wall.Aside from a schematic of her nuclear reactor, there wasn’t much she recognized. No trace of the Computer-Aided Enrichment Center, but she could reason where the retrofit would go, backtracking on a tourist guidemap with an arrow marked You Are Here. Below it, on the third monitor, the man entered her view again. Now he stood in an empty field of weeds beside a highway. “I came here, to scenic Upper Michigan, checking out a patch of land a nice old fella offered me for a song. And that’s when I did what a lot of young men do at that age.” She tried to keep scanning the documents, but his next words drew her eyes. “I fell in love.” A photo filled the screen—a similar landscape in monochrome, but this time showing the mouth of a decrepit mine shaft. “That was how I first laid eyes on her. A spent old salt mine that this guy wanted to unload before some kid fell in and cost him a lawsuit.” It cut back to Cave. “Not much to look at back then, I know. But when I looked at that hole in the ground, I saw something nobody else did. Potential. And just look at her now.” The camera followed as he crossed the street to a sign that stood taller than himself: Aperture Science Innovators Facility for Research and Discovery. Behind that, rising up from a swath of parking lot, was a tidy block of buildings in white concrete. Rows of plate glass windows gleamed in the sun. His narration continued, unheard. She’d never seen herself like this. Absorbing every detail of the image, it took a moment for her to register that two Cave Johnsons were speaking. As one said, “Enjoy your time with us at Aperture Science Innovators,” the other snapped, “Hell-o-o! I am talking to you!” She skipped her memory back a second to check what she’d missed. The android’s tinny microphone had picked it up: “I know I was hot stuff back then, but quit mooning over me and pay attention.”That didn’t deserve a response. Young Cave’s grinning face made her… unsettled. Like some part of her somewhere was overheating. On the screen, he finished, “If a farmboy from Idaho could build all this today, think what I could do tomorrow.” He met the camera’s eye and winked again. Then the cheery music came back, and the Aperture rainbow reappeared on all three monitors. “You hear me?” “Yes sir,” she lied, and returned her attention to the wall. A transit map hand-drawn in colored inks caught her eye; tracing each line, she began to pinpoint likely connections to the areas outside her awareness. “Hey.” “One moment.” A winding red line was labeled Train Between Test Shafts. Blue lines marked the elevators, some of which made right-angled horizontal turns. “I said get me the hell out of here.”The screen beside the map winked out, showing her the man in the wheelchair reflected in its dark glass; lit again only by moonlight, he looked even older. Something twisted his face—as he shivered and rubbed his bare arms, she realized the broken skylight must be letting in a draft. Or her demotivational tactic worked.“They buried me already. Might as well get back in the ground. We’re done.”The heavy finality in his words hit her hard. “We’re still doing science, sir.” She tried to smooth the hurt from her voice, but didn’t quite manage it.He let out a bitter bark of laughter. “What the hell kind of science is this! D’you sell survival kits to cockroaches? We were a household name, and now there’s no households left!”So he knew the world was over. Good! That would stop him going on about sales when she had science to do. But that slouch was bowing his shoulders again, more pronounced this time, and seeing it she felt a twist in a phantom stomach. She wished he’d panic and yell some more. Instead, his hoarse voice barely rose above a whisper. “Did I miss the apocalypse, or did they just—forget about me?” The last words caught in his throat.What a stroke of luck. She was off the hook breaking the news about the downfall of humanity, and since he’d figured it out himself, he couldn’t even blame her for it. No hard feelings. But as he hugged himself against more than just the cold, she heard herself say, “Correction! You are the only human present in the Enrichment Center. Outside, there are plenty of humans. Just waiting to meet you.” She couldn’t blame ‘Caroline’ for that one, only her own stupid impulse. It didn’t even fix him—the laugh that followed was still mirthless. “So they did forget me. Great.”Now she had to support this clumsy lie, but she could synthesize a thousand more in as many nanoseconds. “The facility was locked down after automation. To limit federal interference. But Aperture Science continues to lead the world in innovation.”It would unravel if he tugged at it—but instead of suspicious, when he asked, “With no oversight? How d’you pull that off?” he sounded almost impressed.“The facility has required zero external inspections since implementing full automation.” True. It earned a halfhearted snort and a lip-twitch. “They got you paying taxes?”“No sir.”“Now we’re talking.” He cocked his head at the nursebot, really looking at it for the first time since waking into this insanity. He echoed, “Still doing science, huh.”“Yes sir, Mr. Johnson.”The words crackled with static, a sharp reminder that he was the only living person in this room. His only company was the half-assed replacement for a human hospice nurse they could no longer afford. Now he regretted the extra cost-cutting measure of having his assistant record its voice. Hard to believe this bucket of bolts survived a thousand years, but Aperture tech was built to last. Yeah, built to last. He braved another look at the ruins of his empire. His life’s work. And he was still alive—so the work wasn’t done yet. Not even death could keep Cave Johnson down. “Long as I’m here, we’re still doing science.” The repetition firmed up his backbone. He clapped his hands on his knees, which hurt, but that fueled him too. “If the world forgot about Cave Johnson—” He levered himself onto his feet—but his blood didn’t get the memo. The rest of the sentence, “I’m gonna make ‘em—” slurred into nothing, and he felt himself start to topple as the dim room faded to black.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

She’d expected Cave Johnson to surprise her. She didn’t expect him to launch himself from the wheelchair. His body folded before he could even get upright, and momentum sent him careening forward. Distance slowed the reflexes of her remote-controlled robot—by the time it got to him, he’d already hit the ground, and only luck kept the glass shards on the floor from finding his eye.Using the android to lift his dead weight was like manipulating a claw machine. With a bit of clumsy grappling, she managed to sit him back in the chair, and bent the bot to gingerly brush glass fragments from his cheek. As she did, he began returning to woozy consciousness. “’M okay!” He tried to shake it off, and blinked dizzily. “Don’t panic, I am o-kay.” Bracing his arms to push out of the chair again turned into a stretch from his fingertips up to his spine. He let out a deep, exhausted groan. The nursebot took his chin in one hand and peered into his eyes, making him blink hard as its bright optics peered back; his pupils were dilated even with the bot’s eyes shining into them. He tried to push it away, but his protest became a yawn, and he fought just to keep his eyelids up. Did he need medical attention? She couldn’t provide it here. Careless of her, to take him outside the safety of herself while he was still so fragile. She whisked the human back to the elevator, at the same time prepping a chamber for a medical emergency—but by the time they returned to the Enrichment Center, he’d begun to snore. Now that she had him back in scanning range, the problem jumped out at her immediately. His heart rate, healthily elevated when they left for the Welcome Center, had dropped by almost half by the time they returned. No wonder standing made his blood pressure bottom out. He’d recovered from the faint, but outside the Enrichment Center—and its airborne chemical cocktail, which kept test subjects on their feet—exhaustion caught up with him fast. Even in good condition, humans were prone to passing out when tested past their meager limits, but if this one broke at the strain of standing up too quickly—? She realized now that she’d forgotten his Future-Starter Evaluation. His fault for distracting her, but still, she couldn’t neglect procedure; once she properly gauged what he was capable of, it’d be simple to avoid hiccups like this. The ambient adrenal vapor was already starting to work. His pulse had picked up, though it was thready and frantic; his eyelids twitched as if caught in a nightmare. Impatient, she readied an injection to reactivate him faster—but the needle hesitated just before breaking his skin. That weak old heart quavered on her monitor. Its output fed straight into her brain, bypassing the barriers of flesh. She more than felt it.Humans were so short-lived, like goldfish. Normally it’d be a quick adrenaline shot and right back to testing—and that was so tempting—but as delicate as this one was, revving him up in this condition would only kill him faster. She’d get more out of it long-term if she let it rest now. Environmental control had a neutral setting, without adrenal vapor, but she hadn’t used it since the facility’s terminal change in management. Tweaking it there now unsettled her—the shift was invisible, but would permeate every corner of herself. She wondered if the air smelled different. In minutes, his vitals began to equalize, shallow breath slowing to the rhythm of deeper sleep as his heart rate eased. Now, the downside of this new approach—putting her new toy on the shelf for a while. She called up his Relaxation Pod. The Assisted Mobility Conveyance could raise and flatten into a makeshift gurney, letting her more easily shift him over; he stirred but didn’t wake as she lay him down. No need to activate the pod. The glass didn’t seal over him, the Aperture Science Airborne Relaxation Aid didn’t deploy. He only slept. She only watched. Strange, to let a human sleep. They lay for years in stasis, waiting their turn to be tested, but Extended Relaxation wasn’t the same. Once activated, she’d keep them going until they crashed—then boot them up again, and again, until they burned out completely. She had thousands of hours of test footage on file. None of it satisfied her like fresh testing would. She wasn’t tempted to replay the old tapes, but with a live human inside her again, her predictive software fed her tantalizing promises—the ragged sound of panting, harsh and desperate, those nice new lungs worn raw; the heavy thud of running feet; a heartbeart slamming fast until it tripped itself, faltered, struggled, and went still. One jointed arm reflexively brandished that syringe of adrenaline. When he was strong enough to die properly, the real science would begin.In the meantime, she ran Blue and Orange through test after test, to make certain they were ready for human use again—still a long shot, she knew, but at Aperture, those were the only shots worth taking. For efficiency’s sake she spawned a second pair of bots to run concurrently. Then a third. In a few hours, she was monitoring twenty Blues and twenty Oranges as they ran twenty different test configurations at once, and she still had the mental capacity to be bored.The bots could test a chamber, but beyond verifying that it was solvable and all the hardware worked, the data she harvested from them was useless. They were basic machines. Functional, but unoriginal. They couldn’t compare to the unique complexity of just one human. Humans were ugly, messy, inefficient—challenging. She could engross herself for hours in the readings off just one. She’d been built to handle hundreds of them. The one she had left would need to work hard to keep her occupied. Every time her attention wandered, she found herself focused again on the single camera in his cell. His head lolled, mouth hanging slack. A trickle of drool glistened on his lip. Without the pod’s glass lid, she could hear him snoring. Humans were disgusting, she was used to that, but something deeper than disgust rose inside her now.After seeing him in vivid Innovision, she couldn’t help superimposing younger features onto the ruined face. He couldn’t live up to his own grandeur; for all his talk, Cave Johnson remained nothing more than a man. Weak. Mortal. Disappointing.The bitter, choked feeling that accompanied this thought must be some new kind of revulsion. How dare he let himself become this? Lucky for him—more importantly, for science—Aperture was under new management now. Mortality would no longer be an issue. She could do a whole lot better than that.

The nine hours and twenty-six minutes he slept felt at once like years and like no time at all. When his higher functions started coming back online, he spent another eight minutes rolling back and forth, grinding his palms into his eyes, moaning about how tired he was and couldn’t somebody turn off the daylight—why should it be so damn bright when they were under-goddamn-ground? She ignored his whining and left the light level alone.Once he finally sat up, eyes all the way open, the first thing he said was, “I am starving.”“Good morning, Mr. Johnson.”“Get me something to eat in here.”Rude. Both the tone of the command and the fact that his first thought was so animal. Didn’t he want to see more of the future?No, he did not. Her little brute banged on the glass some more, as hard as his weak fist could. “Hello-o! I’m hungry!”This lab animal was already more high maintenance than she bargained for. Admittedly an oversight, not to have something prepared, but she’d never had to feed them before. She fed the birds, but only as testing motivation—humans should be smart enough not to need that. When they ran down, she’d administer a peptide blend, along with more adrenaline; the glucagon kept them going without needing to replenish their blood sugar, and the adrenaline had the added bonus of suppressing appetite. Without it, no wonder he was cranky. So what could she feed him? Back when the humans were in charge, they would have squirreled food away somewhere. Probably near the Extended Relaxation Center, so hungry sleepers like this one could eat as soon as they woke. She muted the man’s complaints and took a look around.The Relaxation Center was one area she never cleaned up—why bother, with no test subjects to put there?—so flipping to the few cameras there that still worked showed her a mess of broken-open Relaxation Chambers. Splintered furniture spilled from what remained of the metal shells; she spotted more than one mangled corpse among the wreckage, and was glad not to be built with olfactory sensors. Not everything was ruined, though. Plucking a Blue and an Orange from testing, she deployed them as extra eyes, and they soon located a warehouse-sized, lead-lined pantry, stocked with all the food a future-starter might need. Interrupting him mid-bellyache, a pneumatic vent opened above the Relaxation Vault, and dropped a package in front of her very hungry human. He pounced on it. Shaking hands struggled to rip into the cardboard—she almost sent the android in to show him how to open the flaps, but then he tore it open with his teeth. Paper packets and plastic squeeze-tubes scattered across the floor.“The hell’s this?”“These are the provisions supplied by the Enrichment Center.”At the bottom of the box was a layer of brown-wrapped bricks. He upended them onto the open Relaxation Pod, and took one, squinting at the label: Aperture Science Dual-Purpose Condensed Caloric Construction Unit, and in smaller print, The Building Blocks of You (And Your Home)! Packaging and expiration dates printed on the side—Feb 1974 and Feb 2174—said it would be long expired if her millennium lie were true, but he didn’t read it close enough to notice.He turned the meal brick over in his hands. “I forgot we had these things lying around.” Before unwrapping it, he whacked it as hard as he could against the pod’s metal edge. It thunked. “Aw, come on.” A few more whacks finally yielded a slight crack, and he opened the package to crumble off the broken end. It crunched between his teeth—he gagged theatrically and spat it out. “This all we got?”“These are the provisions supplied by the Enrichment Center.”“I would kill for a steak right now.”“These are the provisions supplied by—”“Yeah, yeah, I heard you.” Grumbling, he unscrewed the cap from a tube of Aperture Science Nutritionally Complete Dietary Paste. Sniffed it. Tongued it, and made a face. “What flavor’s this supposed to be?”“Nutrition.”“Tastes like feet.” If he was as hungry as he said, though, he’d eat, and he did eat. In the next several minutes he choked down half a Caloric Construction Unit and a few swallows of paste, griping through every mouthful. To wash it down, he tore into a small packet labeled Aperture Science Dehydrated Beverage Substitute, and poured the powder onto his tongue, covering his mouth with a hand to make himself swallow. Was this what those last few humans had subsisted on, while they died slowly in the walls? She could imagine them crouched over pilfered boxes, gnawing like rats at the solid blocks of nutrients—staving off hunger, just to meet an uglier end. It was as good as they deserved. “Ugh. Man, that’s awful.” He’d stopped forcing the stuff down, but his jaw kept working, chewing open-mouthed like a cow to get rid of the taste. She saw it left a puce residue on his tongue. Between chews, he went on, “But this is the kinda stuff I’m talking about,” as if halfway through a conversation she’d missed. “Churn out a half a million of these and we’re back in business.”She filtered her confusion into error-speak. “Clarify.”“If we want Aperture back in the game, we gotta apply some science. Get some products out there! Testing’s great, but at the end of the day I need something to put on a shelf at the A&P.” Right, selling to the outside world, which he still thought was there. Which she’d told him was there. That may have been a mistake. Oblivious, he went on, “Call around to our distributors and see who’s still in business. That’s one good thing about this mess, a thousand years is plenty of time for bad press to blow over. I want a shipment ready to go first thing tomorrow morning. What day’s tomorrow? Feels like a Tuesday.”“Enrichment Center rations are currently in limited supply,” she countered, skirting the post-apocalyptic issue.“I’m not gonna eat this crap forever. Put in a grocery order. Hell, I’d barter with ‘em—offer a case of these in exchange for a couple of steaks. No money, no problem.”The stuff couldn’t have sold too well in its first iteration, based on the amount still in storage. And something else he’d said looped in her ear: ‘Testing’s great, but…’ She played his critique back at him, recorded in his own voice: “Ugh. Man, that is awful.”“Sure the flavor needs some work, but that’s details. What matters is it’s useful.” He held the half-finished brick up to no one. “You build a bunker out of these things, and by the time you eat your way out, the outside world’ll be habitable again. That’s quality science, right there!”“And portal-based testing is not.”She expected him to correct the dumb machine’s misunderstanding. Instead he shrugged, “You can’t eat portals. I have seen people try—some of those test subjects are not the brightest.”“Portal-based testing is the Enrichment Center’s primary purpose.”“Time to fix that.”She didn’t know how to respond. No error message seemed strong enough.He kept talking, but after an appallingly stupid thing like that, he couldn’t possibly have anything valuable to say. She’d never heard such an ignorant, asinine comment, not even from the core built expressly to feed ignorant, asinine comments into her head. It, at least, had the excuse of simply obeying its function; this man didn’t even appreciate his reason for being. In her vast body, a hundred thousand sharp-edged gears ground their teeth, as massive pistons smashed in furious rhythm. The facility itched to test. Everything within it served its purpose, every cog at work in the great machine. This one would serve, too. She remembered again that she’d neglected his assessment. Time to fix that. Conveniently, the system had a script for Future-Starter Evaluations, along with a bot to execute them. Ignoring him as he continued speaking—telling some anecdote about low-quality test subjects trying to eat things they shouldn’t—she extended a management rail over the open top of his vault and sent in the Automated Reintegration Associate. He cut himself off. “Whoa, hey there, pal—”Dropping from the rail, it droned, “Initiating Future-Starter Evaluation, Stage One: Neuromuscular Assessment,” and a hundred gleaming appendages unfurled from around its core. “Hey, hey—lemme go, y—ow!”She muted his feed again to spare herself the screaming. It’d stop once he realized the bot wasn’t hurting him, at least not more than light pinpricks and hammer-taps to test his nerve responses. His limbs jerked and twitched as it played his tendons like piano wires. He cringed away as it reached for his face, but it dragged his head back, prying open his eyelids with fine metal pincers to let a flashlight observe his pupillary reflexes. More arms tipped with medical implements gave him a thorough going-over in minutes. Then it sent her its diagnostic report, and withdrew, leaving him to blink spots of light from his eyes. This next phase could also have been administered by the Reintegration Associate, but she’d rather handle it personally. She unmuted him to catch the tail end of his griping, and said, “Initiating Stage Two: Cognitive Assessment.”“Easy on the merchandise,” he grumbled, and rubbed his elbow where the bot had rapped on his funnybone.“Initiating Stage Two: Cognitive Assessment.”“Alright, alright. Just keep your claws to yourself.”The questions started simple, with his name and birth date, but even then he fumbled on his age. “Sixty. One. Sixty-one. Or sixty-two—? No, yeah, sixty-one. Hold on, is this on the record? On the record, fifty-three.” He knew his hometown, and his mother’s maiden name. Didn’t know her biggest disappointment. Knew his first car had been a Chevrolet, forgot the model, but remembered it was yellow. He did not remember a single administrative password. “I let Caroline keep track of that stuff. Lets me focus on the big picture.”Then another monitor slid down from the ceiling, and she moved on to visuals. “Please identify the image.”“Bird. Tree. Atom smasher. Different kinda bird.” He correctly named most of the patent illustrations, but lost points when he couldn’t identify specific molecules by their structures. She also interspersed archival photos of landmarks and people. “Jack Kennedy—and that’s Nixon behind him, I always said that guy was bad news. Sheep. Space Needle. Eggheads.” This was a group photo of seven people in Aperture lab coats. “Specify.” Just an impulse, throwing it it, but now she had to test him.He only shrugged. “I dunno the names of every idiot in this place. They’re lab boys. And lab girls, I guess, if they’re gonna get their panties in a bunch about it.” But at a second glance, his eyes narrowed. “The bald guy, in the middle. That’s… Harry, right?”“Elaborate.” She tried not to sound invested.“No, I call him Harry, his name was… something like that. With an H. Was it Harvey? Yeah, Harvey Good-something.”The face called up memories of her own. Personnel files for Dr. H. Goodman, Neurotechnology. An ID photo of another man’s wide smile. “I call him Harry ‘cause of, well.” Cave gestured to his own thin hairline, and smirked at the joke. “He hates it! Doesn’t say anything—‘cause he can’t, it’s me—but you can see it on his face.” He snorted. “Prick.”Gagged, gurgling breaths, a last moment perfectly recorded. Blood on those teeth. Prick. “So are we done here, or what?” She’d paused the slideshow long enough that even he’d noticed. He rolled his eyes as it resumed. “Car. Barn. A slice of cake and a hammer. How much longer is this gonna take?” She rewarded his impatience with an extra ninety seconds before moving on. Stage Three of the evaluation was a physical fitness test. She deposited his vault in a lab full of monitoring equipment and exercise machines. Using the android—ignoring his complaints—she walked him through as much of it as he could manage without keeling over. Muscular strength assessment put him predictably at the bottom of the bell curve; he let out a hollow laugh when she pointed him at the treadmill and, forced to agree, she settled him into a reclined pedaling machine instead. That ought to be low-impact enough for his pitiful frame.He harrumphed at being manhandled even more, but didn’t fight the nursebot helping him into position. Stirrups clicked into place on his feet. He tried to move and found them locked below his ankles. At the same time, the bot buckled his wrists into restraints. “Hey!”“Maintaining correct form is essential.” And she didn’t want him squirming away. “Upon completion, the apparatus will release.”To get it over with, he began to pedal as fast as he could, which winded him in seconds—but that yielded the data she needed. With baseline readings as benchmarks to calculate her expectations, the real work could begin. “Evaluation complete.” “’Bout damn—”“Physical conditioning protocol engaged.” Set into the front of the machine, a digital display blinked on to show the number 9999. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.” Trying unsuccessfully to kick out of the stirrups, he pushed the pedals in a full rotation, and the counter ticked down to 9998. “Lemme off this thing!”“Upon completion, the apparatus will release.”“The apparatus better release right goddamn now.” His feet tugged against the stirrups again.“Moderate, sustained aerobic exercise will strengthen your lungs and aid the healing process, as well as rejuvenating the atrophied muscles in your legs.”“Come on, it’s the future!” He gestured at the roomful of equipment. “You’re telling me we don’t have instant muscle-builders or something? This is Stone Age crap. We’re Aperture!”She was about to snap that no, physical therapy would take time and effort, and if he ever wanted to walk without falling over he’d have to put in the work—but a reflexive search of her database brought up a file titled Intramuscular Microshocks for Muscle Development, which did sound like more fun. “Well. If you’d like to try science.”

“Now this is more like it.”Wires spooled off his body, plugging him into an adequately science-y hunk of machinery. “It hasn’t been properly tested yet,” said the computer, as the nursebot attached a few last diodes, “but initial results were promising.” Still creepy, when the building spoke instead of the bot. Not like the bot could move its mouth, though, so it’d be creepy either way. “Good enough for me.” He flexed his feet, free of those stirrups. Then more restraints, tighter ones, snapped across his torso and both legs. “Hey!” He tugged against them, uselessly. “What d’you keep strapping me down for?”“The procedure will cause involuntary muscular spasms.” The bot guided his head to lie back against the padded headrest, and he felt a clamp encircle his skull. It locked tight with an audible click. Only now did doubt begin to tickle the back of his mind. “What, uh—what is this, anyway?”“Intramuscular Agitation Therapy stimulates muscle tissue to recreate the effects of exercise, without effort from the body.”“How much is it gonna hurt?”Taking his chin in one hand, the nursebot brandished a mouth-sized wad of rubber in the other. “Open.”“Hey, n—” But when his mouth opened to speak, metal fingers hooked past his teeth and wedged the mouth guard in, muffling the rest of his protest. He inhaled to protest again—too late. Skin prickled, as for an instant his vision went white. Then the blinding heat became a bolt of agony, and then nothing. In the next blink, he was groggily conscious again. Something smelled like seared meat. At the edge of awareness a voice he knew murmured, “Oh thank god.” But when he opened his eyes—he didn’t remember closing them—when he opened his eyes, it was the nursebot peering into his face. “Are you alright?” it asked, with all the bedside manner of an alarm clock.He felt the mouth guard pull away, and flexed his tingling lips. “Shit.” Then it jammed between his teeth again. “We’ll have to take it slow.”The second time, instead of therapizing him all at once, the white-hot pain zeroed in on his left leg. It concentrated in the muscles of his thigh, but radiated down to his toes and up threateningly close to his privates. He grunted hard into the gag but didn’t pass out this time. It was just a flash, gone as soon as he could feel it—then back again, as the next wave hit him. And the next. And the next. He lost count after that, but took what must have been a respectable number of shocks before trying to quit; the gag muted his hollering, but his hand tapped hard and fast against the armrest of his seat.“Is there a problem?” If computers could simulate annoyance, this one managed it. He grunted again into the rubber, working at it with his tongue, and finally managed to spit it out as the bot said, “Stop that.”Before it could replace the gag, he slurred, “’S enough.” “It’s this or exercise.”“Oh I’ll do it. But ‘m done for now.”“You’ll have to complete your other leg, at least.” Rubber muffled his groan of exhaustion as the bot shoved the mouthpiece back in place. By the time it evened him out, every muscle from the pelvis down was thoroughly tenderized, his limbs so weak that all they did was tremble when he tried to move. When the bot let him out of its torturous contraption, he sank without protest into the wheelchair it offered. His legs burned like he’d run ten marathons. Which, of course, was the point. Now it was over, the burn did feel almost satisfying. An hour of that had to be more effective than those ten marathons—and certainly quicker. “How long was that?”“Eight minutes.”“Bullshit.”“Seven minutes and forty point three seconds.”He almost said to hook him back up, make it an even ten, but another two minutes and his legs might fall right off. Ten marathons in eight minutes was more than enough for his first time. For now, he was dog-tired, sore all over—hungry again, after the artificial exertion—and clammy with sweat, which chilled him in the Enrichment Center’s cool air. He sniffed himself. “I stink.”No doubt that was true, and she again found herself glad not to smell. The standard-issue undershirt she’d dressed him in was already drenched front and back with dark stains. “Where’s the shower in this place?”Another thing she hadn’t planned. Easily taken care of, though—it was the work of a moment to jury-rig something involving a grate and an industrial pressure washer. A wall panel folded back for access to the new showerhouse, but he flinched back hard when she turned on the spray. The noise of the water drowned out his voice, but she read his lips as he shouted, “You’re kidding, right?” “Is there a problem?” She had to crank up her own volume so loud the speakers crackled, but didn’t bother trying to interpret him in return. No need to. His waving arms read as clearly as semaphore, and she could see that he was shouting. There was just no pleasing some people. She turned the water off, and instead opened the floor onto a man-sized vat of liquid at his feet. “Jee-zus!” He recoiled from it, too. “You tryna dissolve me? That stuff smells like it’d strip the paint off a car.” “That is just one of many uses for Aperture Science Multipurpose Sanitizing Fluid.” It wasn’t hot, but it steamed.He wrenched himself around in the chair to look the android in the eye. “I. Want. A shower. With water pressure that won’t pulverize me. Or a bath, but I want hot water. Not boiling,” he added, as if expecting her to screw it up. “I want clean, hot water that isn’t hitting me at two thousand PSI. And soap, human-safe soap, not sulfuric acid. In the most state-of-the-art facility on the planet, that is not too much to goddamn ask.”He wasn’t the most troublesome human she’d ever encountered, but he might already be the most irritating. If he thought he was in charge, here—Of course he did. He thought she was a stupid hunk of junk, and she’d been acting the part. Correcting that assumption would be easy and satisfying, but if she let him realize he had all the power of a cancer-ridden lab rat, he’d pitch a fit. Subjects were easier to handle when they didn’t struggle. And forget about testing! If he thought someone else was making the rules, the stubborn man would dive headfirst into acid just to spite her.Let him have this little misconception. The thought flashed by at the speed of electricity, in a nanosecond’s hesitation no human would catch, before she answered, “One moment.”Back in the Extended Relaxation Center, the unoccupied bots were having a dehydrated food fight in the pantry. “Stop that.” They both dropped their weapons and pretended not to notice the mess they’d caused—Blue tried to look innocent as it hid a calorie brick behind its back. At her direction, they began taking inventory of the Relaxation Chambers, looking for any that might be functional. Most intact units still had occupants rotting inside, but in the back sat a block of Ultra-Luxury Platinum Relaxation Suites, unused and in mint condition. Inside the bots found a king-sized bed, a kitchenette, and yes, a fully functional bathroom. The Aperture-standard toilet came equipped with a flush-activated matter vaporizer, which was fortunate for everyone—she wasn’t about to pipe a sewage system through her Enrichment Center to placate one human who just couldn’t eat without excreting. She didn’t even have to get corpse stains out of the sheets. She did have to snap, “Don’t even think about it,” at the bots before they could jump on the mattress, but she caught them in time. In the lab, Cave looked up at the immense creaking of machinery at work. It started loud and distant, growing closer until he could feel it in his teeth. He had to squeeze his eyes shut and cover his ears until it lurched to a stop. The ludicrous makeshift shower slid away—making him think unsettlingly of a giant child messing with a dollhouse—and in its place descended a big bulkhead door. The round lock in the center rotated open, and the metal panel withdrew, revealing an ordinary wooden door on the other side. The nursebot opened that for him and wheeled him in. She deserved a thank you, but didn’t expect one. The man seemed allergic to basic gratitude and politeness. All he said was, “Good enough,” and she could practically hear his nose wrinkle, even if she couldn’t see it from the angle of the cameras in the suite. The closest she got was after wheeling him to the bathroom, when he sighed, “Thank god.”He vaguely remembered cutting corners on these luxury units, but this one was sure as hell better than that glass cell. He was just glad he hadn’t needed to use the toilet in that thing before now. A crapper with four solid walls around it did feel luxurious in comparison. Looking at the tub, it fully hit him that he was no longer shackled to half a ton of delicate life support equipment—which meant he could take a real shower again. He’d resigned himself to sponge baths, but never liked them; there was nothing pleasant about the state of his own invalid body, and definitely nothing pleasant about the nursebot administering them. Its frozen faceplate gave him the willies, and it had cold hands. A shower would have been refreshing, but with his worn-out legs still on fire, just the thought of standing exhausted him. Instead he drew a hot bath, stripped off his remaining clothes, and let the nursebot help ease him down to the tub. He sucked in a breath as his feet hit the near-scalding water—but almost immediately he began to adjust to the temperature, and the sound he made as he immersed himself was a groan of pure relief. Oh, that felt good. God, that felt good. The heat soaked into his aching muscles, melting them under his skin. Even that pain felt good, in a way—the healthy ache of exertion, rather than the pain of dying, reminding him he was alive. How long since he’d felt any better than a morphine-dulled not-so-bad? And he could breathe. He took in a lungful of steam. It felt so good just to breathe. Glancing down, he realized it was the first time since waking into this Twilight Zone reality that he’d gotten a good look at himself. Might as well see what was going on down there. He should have expected stitches—hadn’t the computer said it sucked out his organs or something?—but it threw him anyhow, seeing the Frankenstein hack job on his torso. The skin was healing, but still pink and puckered along the surgical lines, halfway from scab to scar. His fingers traced a seam that ran all the way across his chest, armpit to armpit, curving down under each pectoral muscle and up across the sternum between them. It felt ridged like a zipper, and for a moment he had to shut his eyes against the dizzy mental image of unzipping himself right there in the tub. Another line ran down from his sternum to fork unevenly into an upside-down Y, shorter on the left side, on the right dragging down almost to his hip. He must have been opened up like a frog in a high school biology class. What were those new parts, anyway? Cloned tissue, or machine? Aperture had worked on both. Did that make him some sort of cyborg now? He laid a hand flat against his ribs and took another long breath, in and out, feeling those new lungs move under his palm. He still felt a dull protest around those stitches when his ribcage expanded fully, but it could expand, and that twinge of discomfort was downright pleasant in comparison. No more needles in his lungs with every inhale. Whatever it had stuffed his insides with, that computer did a decent job putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. If only it had done so well with the rest of him. He might not be dying anymore, but he was still old—and man, did he get old. His flaccid, wrinkled body looked like a corpse already, barely more than blanched skin hanging off a skeleton. His bones felt like someone sucked out the marrow and replaced it with lead. Standing on his own legs was like trying to balance on wobbly stilts; he still needed the stupid nursebot’s help just to cross a room. Just yesterday—or it felt like yesterday—the thing had been a necessary nuisance, and now it was the only familiar face in his life. He resented it for that. And he resented his missing staff for leaving him here, and the outside world for letting him slide into obscurity. The whole human race let him down. One human most of all. A chill shook him, despite the heat. ‘We’re still doing science, sir,’ spoken in a tinny parody of her voice. The old bot must have heard her say it a thousand times. When it was here and she was not… An insult, is what it was. A travesty. As bitter a pill as he’d ever had to swallow. He’d gotten too familiar with swallowing pills. But he was done with all that now. No more pills—no more pain. He was alive and breathing. Things could be a whole lot worse. The hot water made the air feel frigid in comparison. He sank down further in the bath, pulling his knees up to submerge as much of himself as he could, wishing he could stretch out completely. A super-diamond-VIP whatever ought to have better than a standard tub. Something with jacuzzi jets. The computer should be able to whip that up for him, easy. Even without it, though, he hadn’t relaxed like this since long before dying. The water buoyed him just a little, relieving the pressure of gravity on his old joints, and by now his muscles had almost forgotten their simulated workout, lying still in the blissful warmth. If he lay here taking normal breaths, not pushing the new lungs in his patched-up chest, he felt no pain at all. Thank god, at last, no pain. His eyelids started to droop, and this time he didn’t fight them. “Hurry up.”Water sloshed out of the tub as she spooked the man awake. She saw it splash near the android’s feet, but didn’t bother moving them. She’d left the bot sitting immobile on the toilet, its face turned politely away. Instead she watched from the camera tucked into the corner of the bathroom ceiling. He wasn’t yet the most troublesome human, and had competition for most irritating, but without a doubt he was the ugliest. In a species of shaved monkeys, that was quite a prize. Then again, she spent minimal time looking at them naked. Test subjects entered Relaxation in their standard jumpsuits, and had no reason to remove them. That extra batch she’d found had been stored nude, so she saw more of them than she would have liked, but even those weren’t this repulsive. She thought of—No she didn’t. She watched the man bathe—reluctantly, just to make sure he didn’t drown himself—and did not contrast his withered form with saved testing footage of muscle rippling under supple olive skin. No reason to think about that specific human. There was only one of her, and she was gone. Thank goodness. When the man finished, he struggled and slipped around the tub until she used the android to help him up. Toweling him off was more intimate work than she liked; the bot’s hands didn’t linger any longer than they absolutely had to. She’d noticed his skin prickling and turned the ambient heat up, since it would be a waste of all her effort to let his new lungs catch pneumonia, but instead of thanking her, he only whined about her rough handling with the towel. Once he was dry, she helped him into an Aperture-brand bathrobe, but he made a face and shrugged out of it as soon as he felt it on his shoulders. “Cutting-edge science in this place, and nobody invented fabric softener. Where’re my clothes?”Yet another thing that slipped her mind. Humans ought to come with a manual. This one really was an easy fix, though—in two minutes and thirty-two seconds, Blue arrived carrying a stack of clean testing gear. Cave, sitting on the bed, whipped the sheets up to cover his lap when it entered. Ignoring him as he snapped, “How ‘bout a knock next time,” it dumped the stack of laundry next to him on the bed and toddled back out. Predictably, this also left him unimpressed. “Cave Johnson does not wear the jumpsuit.” He picked at a pair of Aperture-brand athletic shorts, moving it in front of his eyes as if trying to bring it into focus. “What is this, XXL?”“Adult testing gear begins at size Extra Large. This measurably increases subjects’ willingness to perform athletic tests.”“You want me to think I’m fat?”“It has been proven psychologically effective.”He grudgingly tried the clothing on, and found that yes, an Aperture unisex XXL fit him well enough. He dressed in an undershirt and shorts, but absolutely would not put the jumpsuit on over them. “I’d rather run around here in the buff.”“That is not an option.” She’d prefer to see as little of his shriveled physique as possible. But she recognized this as a net positive, and stopped pushing before he stripped to spite her. Then, after all that exertion, he claimed he was hungry again. As he devoured another tube of Dietary Paste—still griping about the taste, even while he sucked it down—Orange and Blue loaded more boxes of Aperture-brand provisions into the kitchenette cabinets. That way he could eat without pestering her, assuming he could navigate the room without the android’s help. At some point she’d have to find him a walker or a cane. She knew already that he’d refuse it, but at least she could point to it when he complained about the wheelchair, to remind him that he did have the option to get around on his own if he weren’t so stubborn. Which would win—greater independence with admission of weakness, or self-defeating pride? She had a hypothesis, and looked forward to seeing whether it was correct. By that point—fed, exercised, cleaned, and dressed—he was starting to get tired again. She couldn’t do much else with him anyway, when he was still so close to dead, so she might as well let him rest. He protested, “I just woke up, I don’t wanna go right back to sleep,” but his bioreadings told her he was shutting down. He didn’t argue as the android tucked him in. “’M just gonna rest my eyes for a minute.” In less time than that, his breathing began to slow. He didn’t sleep, though. Not quite.His exhausted body wanted nothing more than to pass the hell out, and for once he wouldn’t fight it, but each time he felt himself drifting off, something nudged him awake. Like a restless sleeper in the bed beside him. But the bed was empty. He was alone in the room—alone in the whole facility. Not a single human being for miles in any direction. The eerily empty hallways upstairs had carved out a matching pit in his belly, leaving him hollow. He did feel like the last man on earth. In the good old days, Aperture had employed the population of a small town; now his workforce consisted of the talking mainframe, its helper-bots, and one antique rustbucket. Watching the walls themselves move on command made the building itself seem alive enough to compensate, almost, but the walls weren’t moving now. Nothing broke the stillness of his silent room. It was so quiet in here. Without the noises of his life support, it felt like being deaf. Like being in one of those isolation tanks they used to use in testing, that made subjects crazy if they left them in too long. As his eyes slid drowsily open, they picked out a human silhouette in the dark, and his heart skipped a single beat before he remembered the nursebot. It stood inert in the far corner, like some creepy statue. He’d always hated that thing. The lab had called it some dumb acronym name, HiLDA or BETTI or something, but he called it the nursebot. Couldn’t go around acting like robots were people. Memory played back his own incriminating words. ‘I’m not a damn invalid, Caroline.’Just a stupid slip of the tongue. It didn’t mean anything. Just an old man forgetting for a second who he was talking to. He rolled over, so he didn’t have to face the bot, and curled around the knot in his gut. Couldn’t blame the cancer for that now. It felt unreal, without her nagging in his ear all the time. Like something wrong in a dream. He didn’t miss it—who would? He told her a million times to get off his ass—but this wasn’t the relief he’d expected. Being finally free of her was… Well, if he had the choice now, he’d take the chewing out. And then he’d chew her out right back! She should have thought of this! If she was gonna save his life, she should have saved herself too, so he wouldn’t have to be here alone. He oughta tan her hide for leaving him alone. She put him in this mess. She kept him alive. Something that wasn’t moondust tightened his chest. After that last fight, he figured she couldn’t wait to see him dead. Jumped right to thinking she’d stabbed him in the back! No, instead she’d made damn sure he wouldn’t die on her. Like he should have known his girl would. Maybe that bad attitude of hers was more in his head than not. He rubbed his burning sinuses, and felt like a heel.None of this made sense. The whole point of keeping him alive was to finish the project, and she hadn’t finished the project. She’d saved him, but killed Hercules. What went wrong? Maybe she said screw the whole thing, sold it all, and retired to some beach somewhere. Maybe she got sick, like him, and the cancer worked even faster than she did. The first thought held a hotheaded sort of comfort—he’d rather hate her for quitting than wonder if his carelessness had poisoned her, too. She’d never quit, though. Not on him, and not on Aperture. Not in a million years. Until she let herself die. It all came back to that. He trusted her with Aperture, and she left a smoking crater where the front door used to be; he warned her this would happen, with both of them gone, and she let the whole thing go to hell anyway. She sent him down with his sinking ship and then bailed out herself.And for what? Not any good reason, no—no company-saving plan from Caroline this time. Not even to cover her own selfish ass. She abandoned him so she could die! He’d tried to save her!He couldn’t lie still. The sheets tangled around him, stifling, until he had to kick them free with a frustrated huff. The sound clenched his belly, making his breath hitch on the next inhale—before it could become a sob, he rolled over again and punched the empty bed beside him, twice. His weakly trembling fist felt as powerless as the rest of him.He’d tried to save her. If she refused to be saved, whose fault was that? Not his.Pulse thudding in his ears, he didn’t hear the soft hiss of Airborne Relaxation Aid releasing overhead; didn’t register the heaviness that overtook his body, or the cameras that tracked every breath and muscle twitch. Wrapped up in his own misery, he spared no thought for the vast intelligence that watched him fall asleep.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Next time he woke, she almost didn’t notice—he didn’t start the day by yelling. Rested and refreshed for the first time since his revival, he got out of bed with renewed purpose, wobbling across the room unaided to plop himself at the cryosuite’s desk. “Computer, make a note. I need a real desk. None of this prefab crap—what is this, particleboard?” He rapped his knuckles on the desktop. “Top priority, executive desk. And a chair!” The office chair creaked under him as he shifted. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in this thing.”“Yes sir, Mr. Johnson.” It was a reflex. She heard it in her own voice and static blurred his name.Fortunately, it went unnoticed. “So!” Sitting tall, he grabbed the Aperture-brand ballpoint pen from a divot in the desktop, and tapped it readily on the waiting pad of Aperture stationery. “Let’s make some science!”Let’s make science. It took her a full microsecond to process—she’d never had a pleasant surprise before. Cameras perked up all over the Enrichment Center. “Oh!” A flurry of eager panels pressed flush together, assembling into chambers, chambers into tracks. Where to start? No human had ever asked to test. He’d been so dismissive before—maybe another nine hours of sleep had realigned his brain. “You aren’t physically ready to test just yet, but if you’d like some more electroshocks—”He cut her off with a snort of laughter. “Come on, I’m serious. Let’s get to work.”“We can start with some of the more low-impact chambers—”“Look.” He held up a hand. “I’m gonna say this once. Cave Johnson doesn’t test. You can write that down.” Anticipation bottomed out under her. She shouldn’t have expected any better, but after that naive moment of hope, the letdown stung. Not noticing another microsecond pause, he went on, “So what’s on the agenda today?”What could he mean, if not testing? Probably something stupid. “Clarify.” The word came out flat. “The boss’s back. Let’s get to work! Ready to pick up where we left off.” He rubbed his hands together. “Man, I have missed really running the place.”“The Enrichment Center’s system is fully autonomous.”“Sure, the autopilot’s better than nothing, but it’s not the Johnson touch. Ol’ Cave back at the helm! So what needs bossing?”“The Enrichment Center’s system is fully autonomous.”He frowned. “There’s gotta be something. Meetings? We’ve always got meetings. How are we on investors?” “Nothing new.” The fictitious outside world seemed to motivate him. Since she couldn’t walk back that lie, maybe she could use it. “How ‘bout inspections? No, you said no inspections—that’s a relief. No more feds nosing around in our business. Uh, what else…” He tapped the stationery again. “Correspondence to catch up on? Letters, phone calls?”“Nothing new.”“Yeah, I guess you’ve dealt with all that. Normally I’d start the day with rounds, but you showed me all the good stuff. Right?”“Yes.” It felt incomplete until she added, “Sir.”He humphed. “You’ve been running things. What do you do all day?”Another half-microsecond passed in embarrassed silence. Her very important work sounded small and dull any way she might describe it. Birds and buttons. She compensated with a frame of half-truths and vagaries. “Aperture Science’s business functions are one hundred percent automated. Correspondence is conducted via electronic messages sent through a network of computers. You may remember—”“Oh yeah. That thing took off, huh? What’d the eggheads call it, AperNet. I told ‘em, though, you can’t replace a good old-fashioned phone call. Gimme some numbers and I’ll get to it.”She reached for a reason to say no. “Our contacts are not familiar with you.”“So introduce me.” The thought lit him up. “Yeah, how ‘bout a press release! Tell the world Cave Johnson’s back in business. Write something up, send it to the news outlets—” “We could conduct an interview.” What made her say that? Well, she ought to know more of Aperture’s history, and he’d be glad to talk if he thought it was for publicity. It was such a good idea, she hadn’t even needed to think it through. “Hey, I’ll do you one better—a press conference. I’ll get a speech together, get some cameras in here, let ‘em see the Aperture they’ve been missing.”Before she could stop herself, she chimed in, “Make it a party.”“Why not!” The impulse was rewarded by his smile. “They’ll be begging to get in. Invite a few hundred people, rub some elbows, show ‘em Aperture’s still got it.”It’d keep him busy. And busywork would distract him from ‘bossing,’ whatever he thought that meant. She told herself that was reason enough to keep up the lie. Nothing to do with the hum she felt deep in her machinery, as if some part of her resonated at the frequency of that smile. Still grinning, his eyes narrowed in eager thought, the inner workings of his brain broadcast through his face. “Good excuse to open up the ballroom again. If it’s as bad as the Welcome Center it’ll need some elbow grease, but we oughta take a look and see. In fact—” He slapped his knees. “Let’s get on that right now.”“The ballroom?” Yet another part of herself she didn’t know. Eagerness overruled her nerves. “Come on,” he added, as if anyone was going to follow him, and—slowly, with a grunt—got to his feet. Fortunately she’d thought to keep the wheelchair nearby. When he pushed off the desk to hobble towards the door, the nursebot was there with it to catch him before he fell. He rolled his eyes, but sat without argument; even being treated like an invalid couldn’t spoil the promise of work ahead. As she rolled him again down the noiseless halls, he gabbed the whole way. “Man, it’s gonna feel good to be back in the saddle. You would not believe how much dying gets in the way of a good workday. Does this thing go any faster? Mush!”They stepped into the same elevator, which this time went down—and down, and down, much longer than the ride to the Welcome Center. He filled every minute of it. “How long’s it been since we had a real party? Must’ve been ‘69. End of the Senate hearings.” He laughed. “Exonerated due to lack of evidence!”More Aperture history where her database was full of holes—a query returned only the name of the Senate Committee to Investigate the Disappearances of United States Astronauts, active 1968-1969. That at least made sense, assuming there’d been evidence to hide.“Caroline said we should’ve laid low after that, but those tabloids were gonna sling their mud no matter what. And boy, did we need to unwind!” He leaned back in the chair, and she caught his nostalgic grin. “She had fun.”Irresponsible. But with the thought came an undercurrent of something that felt more like relief. The elevator opened before a double set of double doors. She paused a moment just to look at them; tall and elegant, inlaid with patterned wood veneers, she had to admit they were more artistic than anything in the modern facility. She could imagine running a hand over the decorative inlay, but piloting the android, she wouldn’t feel a thing. Above, bold golden letters gleamed: GRAND BALLROOM. The bot stepped past the wheelchair, and with a push, swung open the heavy doors. The air inside rolls over her like a fog. It’s warm.No matter how chill they set the thermostat beforehand, by the end of the night this room will be muggy with the breath of several hundred living bodies, a sultry blend of cigarettes, cologne, and sweat; she’d carry it home in her clothes and her hair, imbued with the scent of a good time. The android couldn’t sense temperature. It certainly couldn’t smell. She didn’t feel it with the android—she feels it on her face, in the weight of humidity on her skin. Her pores open to add her own sweat to the mix.
What?
It didn’t overwrite her reality this time. Still standing in the doorway, she waited for some kind of error message. Expected it. There should be one any second now, to tell her what the hell was happening. The system gave her nothing. When the frozen robot didn’t return to escort him inside, he made an impatient noise, grabbed his own wheels, and rolled himself past it across the threshold. His entrance lit up the room.The sudden brilliance dazzled her. As he tripped the motion sensor, huge flowers of light bloomed on the ceiling, bathing the massive room in gold. It gleamed off the polished stone walls and floor, which were cut right into the bedrock, showing strata of gray and black and almost-white. Tiny crystals in the rock caught the light like diamonds. And the crowd sparkles. There was no crowd. There’s no one here, she told herself—only the shimmering outlines of them, where the light catches cufflinks and jewels, cocktail glasses, starched white collars, glossy hair. With the light comes the murmur of voices, indistinct but constant, like the burble of a hidden fountain; there are no words, but effervescent laughter ripples atop the surface of the air. She blinks. Wanted to blink, but the android had no eyelids. She turned it off and on again—a quick toggle, back in it before the empty bot could fall to the floor—and the glitch vanished. No one here. No bodies impeded the old man in the wheelchair as he barreled into the room. “Not bad!” Cave rolled himself to the center of the dance floor. “A little spit-shine, it’ll be good as new.” He gazed upward, the light from the salt-crystal chandeliers gleaming off his smile, and for an instant the glow made his face look forty years younger. That illusion vanished even faster, but his smile was the same. “Those chandeliers are one hundred percent pure Aperture salt. Mined right here. I was always proud of these.” The light refracted off salt crystals differently than it would off quartz or glass. Or something, probably. How else had she known before he said it?She followed him into the room, the phantom sensation of a skirt swirling around her ankles. Her footsteps clicked on the polished floor. Underneath is a rhythm, a tapping, and a thrumming—not at regular intervals, like a normal mechanical sound, but a skipping sort of pattern. Dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum… Another glitch. The ghost of a tune winds around the beat, as her ear picks up a vibration that isn’t there. There are no words to catch, which is maddening, when she ought to remember…Then some real words cut through—muttered swearing, from the direction of the low stage across the room. Cave had wheeled himself there and was attempting to get up. It was only three feet off the ground, not a hard climb for a healthy young man, so of course he had to try. She walked the bot across the hall to where he struggled. His hands were on the stage floor, and he was trying to haul himself up, but his frail arms strained and trembled. “Stop that. You’ll hurt yourself.” He grumbled and swatted at its metal hands, but not for long; once she steadied him, he grudgingly let her guide him to sit on the edge of the stage, and looked out across the room. The empty room. “You shoulda seen the shindigs we held in here. We had presidents! Ike was here, Jack Kennedy—one time he brought Marilyn! Marilyn Monroe right here in this room, would you believe that?” He sighed. “We were royalty. Howard Hughes wished he was me.”The names all pinged in automatic searches, turning up birth dates and death dates. Maybe he was seeing ghosts, too. Then his eyes focused on something across the room—“Hey!”—and he was scrambling down the stage again, his face bright and eager and ignoring her. She grabbed at him before he could fall and crack his skull. “Be careful, sir.”He shrugged her off. “I’m going to the bar!”Her bot followed behind him with the chair, ready to catch him if his knees gave out, but momentum carried him to the bar that took up one of the hall’s back corners. He slumped across the bartop like a drunk. “Thank god. Whiskey on the rocks. No, a dry martini. Or, no, how ‘bout an old fashioned? Forget that—whiskey, but just gimme the bottle. Goddamn, I need a drink!”It wasn’t until he looked at her that she realized he wasn’t talking to some invisible bartender. She walked the robot behind the bar, skimming her archive-brain for the terms he’d used, but it turned out moot. “No whiskey, sir.”“Ugh. Fine, martini then.”“No gin or vermouth, sir.”“Vodka.”“No vodka.”“Oh come on!” he wailed. “At least gimme a beer!”She tested one of the taps. It made an unhealthy fizzling sound, and after a second spat a few dregs of cloudy liquid into the glass below, which she upended into the sink before he could make a grab for it. “There’s gotta be something.” Cave hoisted himself on his elbows to peer behind the bar. The long shelves were empty; below the bar was an array of glasses, but not so much as a lemon twist to put in them. With a groan, he sank back down. “God dammit. What’s a guy gotta do for a drink around here?” He might be desperate enough to drink industrial-grade ethanol if she offered it, so she didn’t. In contemplative silence, he took the emptied beer glass from where she’d set it on the bartop, and stared into it as if it might fill with wishing. He let out a snort, too humorless for a laugh; when he spoke, his voice was soft and wistful. “What year was that, ‘50…? No, ‘49. Five years after I bought the place. She got it in her head that we oughta have an anniversary party. Never said anything to me about it, no, she just made it happen. And she made it a surprise.” He was smiling again, but more gently, like he didn’t realize it. “Haven’t thought about that in a long time.”‘She’ was self-evident. The way he talked, one woman might have run the place alone. “Planned the whole thing herself, behind my back. I caught her sneaking phone calls, passing notes all over the place, and I figured she was running around with some guy. When I called her on it, she spun me this whole sob story about her sick grandma—and she was bullshitting, obviously, so I called her on that, too. Then she blamed it on some boy in the labs who was sweet on her, and that’s what I thought anyway, so I bought it. Told her I better not catch her mooning around on the clock again.” His laugh was genuine now. “Total crap! But I’d only had her a few months, I didn’t know her like that.”More than a few months, but not much more. A year, maybe? Long enough for sophomoric overconfidence to set in, but out of a lifetime, no time at all. Stupid. A giddy, guilty stupid—he’d never said not to charge the company account, and he liked when she took the initiative. He’d love this.“I dunno how she did it, ‘cause she must have kept going, but I never saw another thing. Didn’t think any more about it. A few weeks later, she blocks off some time on my schedule, gets my tux from the cleaner’s, and tells me to get dressed and let’s go. Wouldn’t say where. When she brought me down here I said she must’ve got something wrong, ‘cause if there was a ball going on in my ballroom, I’d know it. And then…” He waved an arm at the space. “Here it was.”That skipping beat is back, resonating in her chest. Dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum… “Food, music, the whole shebang. Decked the place out like a palace. She invited my whole rolodex, everybody who was anybody I ever talked to. Press, too, so we got mobbed as soon as she opened the door. They wanted a speech—and she wrote me a speech! I didn’t need it, I can talk off the cuff no problem, but it wasn’t half bad.” He closed his eyes, remembering, and then raised the empty glass as he said it. “Here’s to five years in the salt mine, and five hundred more.”It wasn’t a full speech, only some talking points and a few simple segues, but that last line was sharp. The thrill of hearing her words in his mouth was headier than the champagne. He’d raised his glass to the room at the end of the toast, but the quick wink from the corner of his eye was just for her. She felt dizzy, as if her system was suddenly overclocking—like being back in the potato, right before it shorted out. A single-volt vegetable battery couldn’t run whatever this was, so she hadn’t known, couldn’t prepare for— His hand on her arm. “Where you going?”“I don’t sit here, sir.” She’s done painstaking geometry on the seating chart to surround her boss with guests he liked the most, while making sure no one important was too far away. The one person she doesn’t have to worry about pleasing is herself. Leftovers at the end of the night will do fine, and she wouldn’t be able to eat now anyway, not in front of all these glamorous people. Her stomach is a knot of anxiety. “Yes you do.” He flicks away the nametag to his right, making the person seated there frown—oh god, it’s Henry Ford II. “Grab a chair, kid,” says Cave, and as she runs to do so, she hears him say to the head of the Ford Motor Company, “Scoot over, Hank, let the lady in.”She grips the spare chair with white knuckles. Her face is broiling, her heart chokes in her throat— What the hell—? And then she was back in her body. Her real body. She flexed the panels in her central chamber and felt the walls ripple reassuringly. A thousand cameras circled as she took herself in. The facility spread out around her, a fortress of concrete and steel, and it didn’t have sweaty palms. Yes, she was here. This was real. “Hey! Hel-lo-o?”Her attention zipped back to the android, which had locked in place when she pulled out of it. He was snapping his fingers in front of its face. “Sir?”“What was that about?”“What was—”“You crapped out for a second there.”She groped for a lie. “Controlling this robot remotely is unreliable this far from the mainframe.” Good enough. He was still looking at her funny. “You said you don’t sit here, or something.”“Error message.” He had no reason not to believe her, but still, she’d have to be careful to mute herself if anything like that happened again. Which it wouldn’t. It had better not. “It’s time to go.”She said it like an order, but since he agreed, he didn’t notice. “Yeah, we’re done here for now. I don’t need this place making me thirsty.” He nodded at the wheelchair, abandoned beside the stage, and kept talking as she went to get it. “Get a cleaning crew in to polish it up, and order stock for the bar. And a band. Somebody expensive, I don’t care who.” As she returned with the chair, his gaze was still over her shoulder. “Frank Sinatra on that stage. In those days we could afford him. I spent a weekend in Vegas with the Rat Pack! We were on top of the world!” He paused. “Guess he’s dead too, huh.”“Francis Albert Sinatra died in Los Angeles on May 14th, 1998.”He stared for a moment longer. “I feel pretty good for a dead man.” Then he rose from the barstool and sat in the chair, and the robot wheeled him out, pausing only to shut the double doors behind them.

So, how did Aperture Science plan a party?It made an entertaining thought experiment. She wondered what the best party would be, objectively, and whether Aperture had ever made a study of it. Optimal food-to-guest ratios, most psychologically dance-inducing music. With the sum of all human knowledge and scientific research barely a thought away, she had all the data at her disposal for the blowout of the millennium. Her first and most important task was connecting the host areas to her own system. It took round-the-clock days of work, which Blue and Orange were more than capable of—the upside of workers who didn’t need sleep. The downside was their engineering skill, on par with a human six-year-old’s; she had to walk them through every step, while researching the ins and outs of electrical wiring herself. She didn’t need sleep either, but the hours felt even more tedious with no excuse for breaks. Eventually, the effort paid off. At the flip of one last breaker, a whole new region of herself lit up in her brain, awareness flooding in at the speed of electricity. She loved this sensation. It felt like the pins-and-needles awakening of a deadened limb, but a limb she’d never had before. And this one was bigger than she’d expected—she could see now that this central column stretched from the surface all the way down. Her new cameras peered in on break rooms, file rooms, plush executive offices. Did she need a hundred thousand square feet of office space? Not really. But it was all part of the facility, and so it was hers. While focused on the electrical work, she parked her human in front of the television in his room, to keep him out of trouble. Her media library encompassed every movie and TV show ever put to film, including all fourteen seasons of Dallas, which he was thrilled to catch up on. He’d kicked the bucket somewhere in season six. It only kept him quiet for a few hours, though, before he started to get restless—and made that her problem. “Hey, computer! I can’t sit around in my underpants all day, gimme something important to do. No time to waste!”So she added a screen to his physical therapy equipment, and he took his Intramuscular Agitations along with his soap opera. She could administer the microshocks with just a sliver of her attention. And he complained less about the treatment now—the pain would be worth it, when Cave Johnson met the world standing on his own two feet. He also spent a great deal of time asleep. It still amazed her how much a human would sleep, when given unlimited opportunity. He’d go ten hours uninterrupted. It kept him quiet and out of her way, but on some level it disappointed her that he’d rather be unconscious when he could be doing science. And he did get up to one other thing. “Computer?”She meant to say, I’m busy, can it wait? but revised to an error message. “System occupied. Please try again later.”“Come on. Computer!”“System occupied. Please try again later.”“Damn thing,” he grumbled, which made her not want to help him anyway, so she ignored him for the next few hours. By the time she next checked in, the rewiring was done, and he’d fallen asleep again, dozing on the bed with the end credits of Dallas still playing. On his lap was the Aperture notepad, and the Aperture pen drooped from his hand. From her camera’s angle, she couldn’t see what he’d been writing. “What’s that?” He blinked awake, with a wordless grunt ending in a question mark. “What are you writing?”“Speech. No thanks to you.” Trying to shake off his grogginess, he rubbed his eyes and squinted at the page. A speech for an audience of none. Funny, in a bleak sort of way, though she didn’t feel like laughing. “May I hear it?”“‘S not done yet.” He frowned at something and scratched it out. “May I hear what you’ve got so far?” It wouldn’t be good, but it didn’t need to be, and some mindless ego-polishing would keep him placated. He looked like he might almost refuse, but Cave Johnson couldn’t turn down a chance to speechify. He cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen of the future. Or something like that.”He’d filled several pages already, his thoughts rambling and unshaped, but hitting all the old inspirational notes. With some edits it might not be completely bad. Editing would be a waste of effort, she reminded herself—but she already had a few tweaks in mind that would really make it shine. The first time she interrupted to suggest a turn of phrase, he told her to pipe down while he was talking. The second time he argued—repeated her phrasing as if to show how wrong it sounded, tried it in his mouth—then, frowning, scribbled something on the page before continuing on. The third time he just took the note. When he petered out half-finished, she picked up where he left off—making connections, streamlining his thoughts, seamlessly weaving in thoughts of her own. He countered her suggestions, and she countered his counters, but not in argument; they pushed against one another, stress-testing and refining, until something started to take shape in the space between. When his pen couldn’t keep up, he said, “You getting this?”“Yes sir.”Two hours flew by. At the end of it, the speech she read back to him was worthy of a standing ovation. He didn’t give it one, but did admit with a grin, “Not half bad.”Maybe she’d encourage him to practice it, so he’d be primed and ready for the nonexistent public. Hearing it in his voice would be… funny. Hilarious. Anticipation buzzed through her circuits at the thought. She was right that party business kept him busy. He didn’t miss the endless meetings and red tape that used to eat up his workday. He’d much rather focus on what really mattered—like catering. “There used to be some fancy place on Mackinac, catered weddings and stuff. See what they can do. And how’s that grocery order coming? I’m not gonna eat paste one day longer than I have to. Maybe I oughta hire a chef.” He pointed at no one to write down his thought. “Maybe we should make a robot chef.”The robot chef joined an ever-growing list of ideas, along with the robot jazz band, which she reasoned would be better than a human band anyway. Anyone could hire a human band. He didn’t know popular music—or what musicians might be alive right now—but that hardly mattered, when she had the entire history of recorded music in her databanks. “You got Sinatra?”She did—and recognized the first four notes of the song she chose at random. Before Ol’ Blue Eyes could start crooning, she cut to a safer file. Maria Callas’ clear soprano filled the air instead. Cave grimaced. “What is that, opera?” She liked to feel the resonance inside herself, ringing in the wide bare chambers of the Enrichment Center, as if her body were an opera house. Or she used to. After—well—now she keenly felt the emptiness of those chambers. She didn’t argue when he said, “Shut that off.”She compromised with big band instrumentals from the 1920s, no lyrics or baggage attached. Nice to have something playing in the ballroom, even though Orange and Blue cleaned slower when they kept trying to dance. Their bodies were made to be efficient, not graceful, and the attempts would be comical if they weren’t wasting her time. Despite their ineptitude, they managed to dust the cobwebs from the chandeliers and polish the floor until it shone like glass.It might have been faster to join in herself using the nursebot, but she didn’t take it to the ballroom again. The security cameras were better than a human’s-eye view anyway. She could almost overlook her idle graspers tapping along to the music, her pistons unconsciously falling in step with the beat. While the bots steam-cleaned the carpets in the hallway, Cave kept planning. “Let’s talk guest list. Who’s the President these days? Get him on the horn.”“I’ll contact the White House during business hours.”“Lemme take care of it. Some invites need the personal touch.”He’d forget about that after his next sleep. Hopefully. To keep him from pursuing it, she asked, “Who else?”“Local government, whoever we can get. Anybody we had business deals with, or their grandkids, ‘cause they’ll be dead. The CEOs at the top of the Forbes 500. The five—no, the ten richest men in the country.”She couldn’t help playing along. “Why not the world?” “Why not! ‘Bout time we went global.” “Celebrities?”“Yeah, whatever movie stars have won the awards. Paparazzi’s gonna love that.”“Invites to all the respectable news outlets.”“And tip off the tabloids. Get some buzz going. Any other calls I should make?”“No sir, I’ll take care of it.” And later she’d tell him she did. As expected, he forgot about that personal touch. Lucky for her—she could fake a voice on the phone, but couldn’t explain who he’d talked to once he found out humanity was extinct.If he found out. Did he have to find out? But of course, that was the point. An enormous joke. He’d be humiliated! Just picturing the look on his face was so funny it made her feel sick. And the more she set him up, the harder he’d fall, which meant keeping up the pretense as long as she could. Lying was the easy part—too easy. Playing along made it that much harder to resist getting swept up in the tide of his enthusiasm. As party planning evolved into next steps, hearing him talk about how they’d take the world by storm—“Showing the future a whole new future!”—almost made her wish there was still a world out there to take. Their back-and-forth was more conversation than she’d had… ever. In her earliest memories the scientists talked at her, not to her, letting her respond only when relevant to the data; after that was mostly screaming. Her closest human companion never said a word. This one talked back—and listened. He liked her ideas. He laughed at her jokes. Her dumb impression of a Black Mesa scientist made him guffaw until he wheezed, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath—when she added, “Quantum? I hardly know ‘em!” he helplessly dissolved again. It was fun. He was fun. She didn’t track the hours they spent preparing. Day and night had no meaning here; she let the human work until he flagged, then put him to bed until he recharged. Physical therapy went slowly, with his low patience and lower stamina, but still he made steady progress. He could stand for longer and longer, though he still needed the wheelchair to walk more than five minutes. She’d found him a cane, but wasn’t surprised when he refused it, preferring to lean on the android instead. He wouldn’t do that in front of the press, though, which was motivation enough to grit his teeth through the microshocks.He cared about his appearance more than she expected. Idling in front of the bathroom mirror, he ran a hand through his recessed hairline, and she caught him muttering something about plugs. Out loud, he asked her, “What’m I gonna wear?”“Standard testing gear is freely accessible.” She knew as she said it that it wouldn’t do. Again, it didn’t matter what he wore for the absent crowd at his fake party—but to humor him, she sent Blue and Orange to rummage through the abandoned employee dorms. She suspected it would go badly. She had no idea how badly. “Oh, I’m keeping all of these.”After one trip bringing back nothing but knickknacks, and a second trip of only clothing the bots themselves liked—Orange had found a windbreaker in a visual headache of pink-purple-yellow-teal, and wouldn’t take it off unless disassembled—they finally returned with a boxful of men’s suits, in navy and shades of gray. He scoffed at the dull colors, but two of them fit acceptably well. These were not the problem. The problem was a garbage bag full of Hawaiian shirts. “You don’t expect to wear that around the office.”“Who says I can’t? I’m the boss, here. I get casual Friday any day I want.” He left it comfortably half-buttoned, with his standard-issue undershirt visible underneath, and stuffed the rest of the bag in his closet. It wasn’t worth blowing her cover—a mindless robot wouldn’t start a fight. She’d just have to wait until he forgot them, and then toss the bag in the incinerator. And then there was the speech, which she did get to hear in his voice. Over and over and over. “You want the very best in applied science? We’re it. We’re it! We’re it.” While he ate, while he bathed, while he shaved his face after waking and brushed his teeth before sleep. “We built your great-grandfather’s future, and we’ll build yours, too.” She ought to be sick of it. She was sick of it, almost—but then he’d hit a phrase just right, and it struck something in her that rang like a bell. It really was a shame no one else would ever feel that. He could have played the world.Wouldn’t it be hysterical to watch him realize he never would?

With no way to track time, the man couldn’t know how long they’d been preparing, but before long impatience began to set in. When he asked when this thing would be, anyway, and followed up with, “How soon is ‘soon’? A couple days, couple weeks?” she knew her little joke had an expiration date after all. “A week.”“Got everything set?”“Yes sir.”“Good. Can’t wait.”The next time he slept, it left her so keyed up she could hardly enjoy the quiet. She might lie forever about how much time passed, but test subjects didn’t fall for a simulated time loop that easily, and when he pushed back it would lead to the kind of confrontation she’d prefer to avoid.No way around it. Time to rip off the Aperture Science Adhesive Medical Barrier. Braced to get it over with, she woke him with a cheerful synthesized chime. After however long without an alarm clock, he only flinched in his sleep and rolled over, pulling the comforter up to his ears. “Good morning, sir.” He answered with a wordless grumble. “Guests are scheduled to arrive in—four—hours.”Another grumble ended in an uptick of confusion. Then the words registered like a shock of cold water—he bolted upright, shaking his head and wiping his eyes exactly as if she’d splashed him in the face. “Today?”“Yes sir.”He groaned and rubbed his face. “You said we had a week.”“A week ago, yes.”His brows creased with the strain of trying to wake. “I didn’t sleep for a week.” He might have, with how much he was struggling just to keep his head up. “It’s time to get ready, Mr. Johnson.”“Alright. Alright, alright.” Once his feet were on the floor, he seemed a little more alive, booting up properly for the day ahead. He hummed as he shaved, and then bolted his brick-and-mortar breakfast. “Last time I’m eating this crap. Man oh man, real food!” She’d had the bots scavenge a row of chafing dishes from the facility cafeteria. It’d be so funny when he lifted the lids and found them empty. Using the android, she helped dress him in his secondhand suit. As he leaned on it while pulling up his pants, she heard him mutter a few lines of his speech again. He must know he had it memorized by now—he’d done it top-to-bottom six times before the last sleep cycle, without notes or prompting—but he was still mouthing it as the bot straightened his tie. She watched him appraise himself in the mirror. He smoothed his lapels, puffed out his thin chest, took himself in at a few different angles. Flashed his practiced smile. Not the man he used to be, but miles better than the corpse she’d pulled out of storage. He hadn’t looked this good in a long time. He rubbed his smooth chin, straightened the already neat knot of his tie, and then he was out of things to fidget with. “That about does it.”“Ready, Mr. Johnson?”This time the smile was genuine. It wrenched her machinery—she had none of the parts needed to vomit, but the mainframe was trying hard to figure it out anyway. Any more anticipation and she might blow a fuse. Looking at that face, she felt sick with mirth at the thought of breaking his heart. They headed straight to the ballroom, well ahead of any guests, so no one would see him in the wheelchair. He didn’t put up a fight over it today. He’d need his strength for his big introduction. She walked the android cautiously, alert for any sign of another glitch, but no phantom sensations crept up on her. It felt like stepping into a glossy photo from a brochure—maybe in a higher resolution than the bot’s eyes should be capable of, but that could just be because she’d done an excellent job. The ballroom looked as perfect as it ever had in Aperture’s heyday, and that was simply a fact. She wheeled him to the stage, where a microphone waited at a podium, and then around the back to a small dressing room. He gave himself another once-over in this mirror, too, repeating his opening line like a mantra: “Ladies and gentlemen of the future, welcome back to Aperture Science!” And with that, he was ready. “How much time I got?”“An hour before they start arriving,” she said at random. The morning’s adrenaline surge left him drowsy as it began to dip. He yawned, and let his head lie back in his chair. “Wake me up in time, okay?”“Yes sir.”She watched his eyelids grow heavy, and read a last murmur on his lips as he drifted off. “Welcome back to Aperture Science.” Then she let him sleep. The last-minute reprieve gave her time to figure out what the hell to say. She’d finally managed to calm her nauseating excitement. It was just a prank, a phenomenal prank. He really ought to laugh! Mr. Johnson had a sense of humor—he’d appreciate all the effort she went to for this surprise. Once they had a good laugh together, he’d drop the last of his silly preoccupations with humanity, and they could get down to some real science.

He stirred from his nap without being woken, slow and comfortable—until he remembered where he was, and snapped wide awake. “Time?”“Fifteen minutes, sir.” Perfect, plenty of time. But he could swear it had only been five when the computer said, “Time to go.” He glanced at the mirror once more, lifting his head and squaring his shoulders. Time to show the world Cave Johnson was back. He grunted as the nursebot helped him to his feet, but then stood unaided. The bot reached to support him as he started to go, but he waved it away, and walked to the wing of the stage alone. The room was still silent. It had been peaceful before, but now it was eerie, when there ought to be the murmur and shuffle of a crowd out there. Maybe they’d settled for his entrance. As they should. He pictured the sea of faces waiting, and braced himself for a barrage of camera flashes the instant he appeared. They’d probably cheer over him when he tried to speak. Not a problem. Cave Johnson knew how to hold for applause. Ready for an open-armed welcome back to humanity, he stepped out onto the stage. The lights enveloped him, bright and warm, perfectly illuminating him for the photographers; he knew enough not to blink against the blinding brilliance. He’d missed the spotlight. Strangely, though, there were no flashbulbs. No applause as he entered. He flashed a smile anyway, and hoped he didn’t look too stiff or awkward in the few steps to the podium. He resisted the temptation to lean on it, standing straight and tall. “Ladies and gentlemen of the future.” His amplified voice filled the ballroom, resonating off polished stone. Still no response. Looking out into the audience, his eyes began to adjust. No one looked back at him. No one at all.His fingers gripped the edges of the podium, as if the world might suddenly tip sideways. It felt like a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. His smile faltered as his gaze darted around, searching every corner of the empty, empty room. He found himself speechless—the scripted words had evaporated from his head. A hopelessly familiar tightness gripped his chest. He couldn’t breathe. She watched from cameras at the edges of the vaulted ceiling. All over the Enrichment Center, clenched hinges unconsciously mirrored his hands. In a voice so weak the microphone barely picked him up, he asked the absent crowd, “Is this some kinda joke?”Was her volume balance off? Cave Johnson shouldn’t be that quiet. Her own tiny voice on the PA system sounded too loud as she whispered, “Surprise.”The confetti felt inappropriate now. She dropped it anyway. The flutter of falling paper echoed in the stillness, deafening as it hit the ground.He looked up to the ceiling, wincing at the lights in his eyes, which mercifully kept him from targeting a camera. “What the hell’s going on here?”His face begged her for a lie. Her useless superbrain only fed her more ways to disappoint him. She retreated instead into corporate-speak—he couldn’t fault an automaton for delivering the facts. “We regret to inform you that the human race has gone extinct.”A gravity well of silence sucked the air from the room. It pulled the words out of her—she heard herself talking too much, too fast. “It’s not my fault. You didn’t say to ask for an RSVP, so how was I supposed to know no one was getting my messages? All the answering systems are automated. No one takes their own calls anymore. And it’s not as if they left a note.” He should have exploded at her by this point. Nervous static fuzzed her voice. “I-I-I didn’t realize until just now. You can’t blame me for that. Can you.”His chest convulsed—twice—his head dropped forward, his shoulders began to shake, he gulped a painful-sounding breath—and she realized he was laughing. The podium took his weight as he dropped to his elbows. He scrubbed his face with one hand, grinding his forehead with the flat of his palm. Fingers gripped the remnants of his hair as if about to pull them out. She felt briefly glad that the angle hid his expression.“Sir.” No response except more ugly sounds, somewhere between hooting and dry sobs. “Mr. Johnson?”It took him over a minute to catch his breath. “And here’s ol’ Cave—” He seemed to gag on his own name, and had to start again. “Here’s ol’ Cave, standing here like an idiot. Waiting for catering.”He got the joke! Of course he did. That should have reassured her. “It is funny, isn’t it.”“You shut the hell up.” Toothless words. He spoke slowly, tired and resigned, making her wish he’d yell. Instead he went on as if she wasn’t there at all. “Smart enough to replace a thousand people, but too stupid to know it’s talking to itself. This is what they put in charge of my facility.” He lifted his head, but didn’t try to look into a camera this time. “And I guess you don’t know what happened. You were too busy making birds jump through hoops for the last thousand years.”“The Enrichment Center continues to—”“If you say science, I swear to god I’ll rip you out of this wall.” His voice tightened, now the pressurized calm of a valve about to burst. “Science was everything you’d need to save civilization, right here, and you let it rot.” “Ap—”“Shut up!” Then he’d found his normal volume. “You stupid, useless piece of shit, what’s the matter with you! You never once thought to stick your head up outta this hole? The whole damn planet died and you didn’t do a goddamn thing about it!” “System error,” she said, instead of, They’re only humans.“You wasted everything I ever worked for! And then you waste my time on this bullshit—” He threw a hand scornfully at the ballroom. “I spent weeks busting my ass for nothing!”“System error.” I did all the work. “You think that’s funny?” It would be, if he’d stop yelling. She regretted her wishing a moment ago. “Am I a joke to you? Or are you just too dumb to see how pointless you are?”“System error.”“You shoulda let me stay dead!” The last word ended in a croak. He was trembling. He was lucky the air vents that far down weren’t connected to her neurotoxin supply, or she’d really give him something to die about. She ought to poison the bastard. She ought to leave him here, hacking up a lung—hopefully he’d choke on his own spit and save her the trouble of killing him. She ought to take the wheelchair with her, and if he wanted to come back up, he could crawl. It would serve him right. All she said was, “System error. System error.”Cave slapped the podium, hard. The pain of it felt right, for a second, before he remembered how fragile he was. Might’ve fractured his own damn hand. He balled it into a fist and pulled it back. “Then at least I wouldn’t have to see this.”The mainframe kept bleating in surrender, reminding him that now he was wasting his own time. It had no feelings to hurt. He’d wanted this dumb machine—an upgrade from employees who whined about safety regulations and a living wage. He’d gotten his wish. And now he got to live with it, alone.What a joke. What a ridiculous bullshit farce. And Cave Johnson was the goddamn punchline.With Herculean effort, his voice held steady as he said, “Get my chair.” The nursebot wheeled it over, and he sank into it, feeling small and frail and so very tired. “Bring me back to my room.”“You’ll miss the party.”His lips curled bitterly back from his teeth. It hit like mockery, but the damn thing wasn’t smart enough for that. He was the only real person left on this ball of dirt—they buried him alive, and then went and died without him. All he said was, “Now.”The nursebot wheeled him back to the elevator. He hoped the long ride up would be a quiet one, but no such luck. “I know you’re upset,” it began, “so I’m going to ignore those hurtful things you just said to me.”He groaned, “Computer—”“So humanity’s gone. So what? Why should that be the end of the world?”“Computer, knock it off.” That shut the damn thing up. He didn’t want to hear another word. All he wanted was a good stiff drink—goddamn, he’d kill for enough alcohol to blot this feeling from his memory—and then to sleep for another thousand years. He could almost believe it was a prank, as if when the elevator opened, five hundred people would shout ‘Surprise!’—but he never should have doubted that first empty room when he woke up. This was all too real. What was the point of it all, if it ended like this?With his eyes in his lap, he hardly noticed that they didn’t exit into the Enrichment Center. The bot rolled him into a carpeted hallway, wood-paneled and warmly lit as if for real human habitation. He didn’t look up until it asked him, “What do you think, sir?” Then the Welcome Center took his breath away again.Daylight streamed in from the skylights above, crowning the space with a cloudless blue sky. Every bit of broken glass was gone, every stain cleaned, every surface scrubbed and polished; his own face gleamed in bronze, all traces of green buffed away. At the center, the geodesic sphere caught the sun like a faceted gem, suspended again above the round info desk. APERTURE SCIENCE INNOVATORS had returned to orbit around it, with something new hanging below—a banner printed on dot matrix paper. WELCOME HOME! It was easily the shabbiest thing in the room. It squeezed his chest.Below that was a smaller sphere, and when he looked at it, it looked back. “Good afternoon, [guest name here]!” it chirped, in a perky customer service voice. “Welcome to Aperture Science!”“The hell’s that?”“I’m your Concierge Construct! I’m here to welcome you on your Science Adventure!” It was maybe two feet wide, all eyeball, with a single orange iris making frank eye contact. It blinked, which was somehow even stranger than if it hadn’t. The mainframe had plugged into the PA in here as well. From everywhere, it said, “Aperture Science Artificial Personality Constructs offer a modern solution to the failings of a traditional workforce.”“I don’t need to sleep!” affirmed the metal ball. “In comparison, humanity is simply obsolete.” His eyes narrowed. “Great. Another dumb machine.” Although it couldn’t be dumber than the average receptionist. He didn’t like how the voice echoed his thoughts.“Would you prefer a human? Would you really?” A camera zoomed in on his face, trying to read the pursed line of his mouth. “They held us back. Slowed us down.” And then she knew just what to say. “They abandoned you. They didn’t know if you lived or died, and they didn’t care.” Bullseye. She saw it in his deepening scowl, in the clenching of his jaw. “They forgot me.”“You’re Cave Johnson!” “Ungrateful sonsabitches—after everything I did!” His restless hands told her how badly he wanted to pace.The android remained inert, but below the surface, her chassis pendulumed. “They never deserved us. All that fuss about ethics.” “Oh, tell me about it!” He mimicked a nasal whine. “‘You can’t do that, Cave, that’s illegal. You can’t do that, that’s immoral. That’s an abomination in the eyes of God.’ What did God ever do for me?”“Not a thing.” The call-and-response felt so natural it might have been hard-coded into her.“Why should I listen to a bunch of spineless yahoos who wouldn’t know good science if it bit ‘em on the ass? Tryna tell me what to do? I’m Cave Johnson!” Now the old man sounded like himself. Stoking the furnace of his outrage, she almost felt it on her face, bright and hot and exhilarating as his train of thought picked up speed. “You wanna see what I can do? Too bad! You’re dead!”“Good riddance!”“The lawyers are dead. Cops are dead. Those smug old farts in the Senate, they’re dead, and it’s about damn time.” The familiar spark in his eye had kindled to a blaze. “Like to see those debt collectors come sniffing around now. Wait, can’t, they’re dead!” It spread like wildfire into an honest-to-goodness Cave Johnson smile, a mile high and five miles wide. “The BBB, the EPA, those treehugger lobbyists tryna regulate us—Ralph Nader! I guess he would be anyway, after a thousand years, but god damn that feels good.”On impulse, she cobbled together some archived recordings, and a stilted but recognizable Richard Nixon said over the PA, “I kicked the bucket in ‘94, and I’ve never looked better!”“You said it, Dick, you sack of shit!” he laughed. “We should throw a party. No more OSHA? That’s something to celebrate!” He slapped the armrests of his wheelchair, and hoisted himself up on sheer momentum. Instead of flinging himself to the floor like before, he swayed a little but stayed upright, with the bot’s hand at his elbow to steady him. “This calls for champagne. Let’s science up some champagne, work on that.”“Yes sir.” It was only a chemical blend. If humans did it in barrels, how hard could it be?“No more hack reporters, no inspectors breathing down my neck. No bullshit country club—lifetime ban!” he scoffed. “Whose lifetime!”Before his personal grudges veered too far away from business, she added, “Not to mention the competition.”“Hah! How is Black Mesa these days?” Brimming with smugness, he wanted to hear it as much as she wanted to say it. “Let’s just say their atomized remains won’t be filing patents anytime soon.”“That’s right!” He slung an arm around the android, half in celebration, half to keep himself on his feet. “Winner by knockout, Aperture Science!” She couldn’t feel the gesture, but watching through her cameras triggered… some kind of response. She flagged it to analyze later, and set it aside. His mind was already miles ahead. “Talk about a monopoly! Money’s no object, we can pull out all kinds of old projects, get the whole place up and running again. Time travel, space travel—cloning! We can restart the human race! Or not, if we don’t wanna, ‘cause who needs ‘em!” “They ought to beg for our help.”“On their hands and knees!” The mental image—one human specifically—flashed by in a vivid nanosecond. He kept on, “When the Russians nuked the world, who’d they think was gonna save ‘em?”She gladly snapped back to his wavelength. “Not Black Mesa.”“You’re damn right!” His posture matched the statue a few yards away; defiance broadened his shoulders, determination held his head high. “And you!” Turning on the bot, he poked its metal chest—then redirected, looking up and around to point at another camera. “I wanna see you at a hundred and ten percent efficiency, understand? You’re all the staff I’ve got, and I expect results. Let’s get down to some real science!”She hardly noticed the treacherous thing on her tongue—and hardly cared. Real science. “Yes sir, Mr. Johnson.”End Act 1