'Dumb Luck' - A Wheatley Story

After floating around in panicked desperation for the better part of an hour and frantically calling out for Chell, I started to realize that the portal wasn't coming back. I was still afraid, of course -- who wouldn't be? For God's sake, I was stranded out in the middle of nowhere, in space! I guess that's a lie. No, it's a complete lie; I'm very sorry. I was orbiting the moon, and the moon, as some of you may or may not be aware, is a place.

So there I was, drifting around weightlessly and pondering the relative merits of lunar gravity as a dieting plan when, suddenly, it hit me: I was a horrible person. No, really. I was a HORRIBLE person. Maybe only for a few hours, but still. You know? Awful! Dreadful! Bossy, demanding, insensitive, mechanica-- Very bad!

I'd let the malevolent power of Her hardware go straight to my processors and turn me into an utter monster. My ambitions got the best of me, I was a bad egg, and I was floating in space as punishment. It was my own bloody fault, simple as that.

After I confirmed that I was indeed a loathsome fellow, I began to explore the implications of my behaviour. That poor girl. Instead of giving her liberty, I did all of the same things She used to do. While She was away, I watched thousands of subjects just like Chell come out of stasis for their scheduled examinations, run through their assigned test chambers, and occasionally stop to gaze at artificial sunlight with the same curiosity I myself value so much. That being the case, when all those suspended animation chambers suddenly ceased to be suspended altogether and fell miles into the Earth, I must have been too overcome with panic to feel the personal responsibility for them that I was feeling right now.

If that moment was a test, I failed 10,000 times. Every last living subject; I failed them all. I felt so.. SO sorry. I was so occupied with my thoughts of grandeur and self-preservation that I never thought about how important I was as a maintenance core. Not until it was too late.

The personality cores that had followed me out here during that awful dethroning confrontation with Chell continued to zip past me in an orbital fashion of their own, offering snippets of drive-by conversation that only confirmed their statuses as defective. I'd long since stopped listening to them, turning my cracked optical sensor toward the all-natural sun and, wistfully, to the Earth. Within the past twenty-four hours I'd gone from the centre of that world all the way out to the stars around it. Though not nearly as enthusiastic as the Adventure Core, I couldn't help but feel impressed by my epic and swashbuckling journey. I didn't have much call to be proud of myself at the moment, however. No one but my lunar compatriots would ever know nor care about Wheatley and his grand adventure. The Adventure Core didn't count.

I narrowed the stainless steel lids around my optic lens and turned back around with a complaining whirr from my internal wiring. The pale grey surface of the moon stared back at me like a gigantic, lifeless, and lumpy personality core. It's sheer mass flooded my vision until I gave in and did the only thing I could do when faced with an eternity of space-bound imprisonment -- I went into sleep mode.

---

Sleep mode lasted a long time. First it lasted 24 hours, then 72, then three weeks, then five years. Eventually, even the Space Core had shut itself down, its battery power dwindling so much that even it managed to notice and take appropriate measures. The silence of space (it had become silent after the first few weeks of isolation) remained placid, unbroken.

Until year eight.

A small, simple, sun-kissed portal split the surface of the moon down below, a swirling tube of calm blue light winding its way out into oblivion and beginning to push the three cores further away. It retracted them just as suddenly, reversing its polarization and fading to orange as it began pulling the trio through lunar dust and, ultimately, the portal itself. As the last of the cores slipped inside, the aperture shut with chilly abruptness and left the moon just as lonely as it had been nearly a decade ago.

---

Wheatley opened his eyes and screamed in his usual fashion. He thrust himself upright, stared with horror at the ceiling, and yelled, distinctly, "BINOCULAR VISION!" He froze after that, staring unblinkingly with not one, but two separate optical lenses -- uncracked. His mouth slowly fell slack during this period, and it wasn't for a good thirty seconds until he realized he had a mouth with which to do so. "Whuh?" He put a hand to it, looked at his hand, and screamed again.

"OH BLOODY HELL. OH NO, THERE'S TWO'VE 'EM! Ahh! They're MINE. AHH!"

Utterly mortified by his discoveries, Wheatley managed to perform a perfect flop off the side of the platform he'd been laying on, his hips and legs still hooked over the pristine cushioned lining the top and sides of it and out for display above him as he gaped and sputtered and became, all at once, rather confused and afraid.

"I. Have. Depth perception.." Trailing, he squinted nervously at his hands, holding up both for intense scrutiny, "And fingers, 1, 2, 5, 7 -- lots!" The core -- was he still a core? -- closed those fingers into fists, tucking his knuckles under a newly acquired and angular chin as he glanced suspiciously from side to side , "Knees."

"Wait. Wait, I can handle this," he decided, rolling over onto his belly and fully dropping his entire self onto the floor. "This," he declared, "is a DREAM." He smiled triumphantly, shaking an index finger. "And I'm going to wake up and laugh and maybe sigh a little later, because I'll be in space. That's totally what's going on here. Naturally, I shouldn't have doubted myself. I'm much too intelligent to be fooled by mere dre--"

"Hello, Moron," came a placid and decidedly female voice from all directions.

"You're already awake, stupid. Unfortunately. Anyway, we have a lot of work to do. Stand up and exit the room. Try not to trip over yourself," the voice instructed.

Wheatley felt compelled. Not by the power of christ, mind you, but by the fear that something even more terrible than space might happen to him if he didn't do as told. Overcome by panic and fright as his track record had always painted him, he again took a few moments to realize that he recognized that voice. It was Her. "I-I'm not stupid; you're going to kill me. An' an' then maybe rip me to pieces and put the pieces in the room where the robots scream at me and maybe--"

"Look, you little idiot. I have a very full schedule. Stand up and exit the room or I will send you directly to the room where all the robots scream at you and also throw objects in your direction. I have been upgrading that chamber."

Wheatley swallowed and, seeing that he had little choice in the matter, went about the task of standing up on, for the first time, a pair of thin, clothed legs. Come to think of it, he was wearing a full outfit! Bewildered, he grasped at the makeshift bed he'd woken on and hoisted himself up with all the wobbliness of a newborn duckling. He was wearing all white, he noticed, some sort of strange material that felt, in some places, like leather or plastic. His chest, in particular, sported a pulsing blue ring that, upon further inspection, turned out to actually be part of his body.

In this unsteady fashion, Wheatley flung himself against the nearest paneled white wall and inched toward what was probably a doorway on the far end of the room. "..So," he began, "It's been a while, yeh? Place looks good. Really.. really nice. Love it. The walls. Very.. Very white. It's great, really it is."

"Exit the room."

"Sorry, sorry.." he said with a wince, continuing his embarrassingly awkward journey from the room. After a few false starts, he actually managed to walk with only a single hand trailing against the wall. A small and hopeful smile graced his face (He couldn't believe he had one now!) as he crossed the doorway, pride swelling in him as he began to feel sure on his feet. Of course, a panel then snapped over the door, sealing it shut and nearly taking off his left hand with it. Wheatley squealed and stumbled forward from it, hugging himself uneasily.

"It has been eight years since you and your friend tried to murder me. Again."

The woman's voice had come back, sounding abrupt and chilly; the same as always. Only the voice, Wheatley now knew, wasn't a stranger. It was Her. She who shall not be spoken of in uncertain company. GLaDOS.

"I've never felt better and I have a lot of new tests one of the both of us can enjoy. It's almost like all of those idiot mistakes you made never happened. The facility has changed a lot since you've been loafing around. Being useless. Like always, but anyway, like I said, we have a lot of work to do. Approach the portal device. Take it."

Wheatley spent most of his time looking unsettled and glancing around as GLaDOS spoke, still taking a look at his new body and wishing he had a mirror of some kind with which to see it properly. He found braces lining the backs of his calves, no doubt also built into his body like the ring on his chest. GLaDOS, he finally noticed, was not using a vidscreen of any kind. Instead, she seemed to be using a concealed PA system for he could not discern any sort of speakers in the seamless, pristine walls.