Blue Sky - Chapter 13 - The Old Friend [2/2]
“Why couldn't it have been flatter?”
With an immense effort, Wheatley managed to hook his elbow over a wire-strung girder. His feet kicked for a moment over twenty feet of thin air, before finally finding a dodgy sort of purchase against an angled strut. He hung there for a moment, panting in short needless gasps, then lurched upwards again, hit his head sharply on the underside of a large, paint-streaked satellite dish, yelped.
“OW! It's- it's showing off, that's all it is, really, I mean, yes, well done, you made a big old tower- impressive- but did you really have to make it so high-”
He clawed up another few feet, slipped, grabbed another girder, hung on for dear life with both arms and both knees, like someone having serious second thoughts about their decision to slide down a fireman's pole. The voice of the cognitive rerouter in his head had settled down into a horrified background wail, and he was managing to ignore it fairly well- now he was concentrating, and on his guard against it- simply by talking right over the top of it.
“-probably not that fair for me to be moaning about it, admittedly, you being all the way down There having God-knows-what done to you, and me up here having a go, but all I'm saying is would it have killed you to make it just that tiny bit more accessible- doubt it- ”
He fumbled around his neck, pulled the big orange ear-protectors up over his head. He'd tried communicating with Foxglove from the ground, wirelessly, first talking and then calling up to her and then finally cupping his hands round his mouth for extra volume and yelling at the top of his voice, but he'd received no response. Wireless was off the menu, apparently. This time around, it was back to tethered networking, or nothing.
Sticking the connector in at the back with only one hand free and the structure around him swaying and creaking like a ship in full sail was the devil's own job, but finally it slid home and he heard the deadened click, felt the slow, spreading sense of connection-
“Hello! You awake in there? Got a bit of a situation. Anyone home?”
The voice rolled back, sleepy and immense, as slow as a tide.
[00004]
“That's me! 00004, A-K-A, also known as, Wheatley, official admin and everything. Password: apple, bagel, unicron. Need to talk to you. Urgent- most urgent level of urgency, you can put that, too, if it helps-”
[password confirmed: apple_bagel_unicron. admin identity confirmed. 00004/[F]AS[IV]IDPC241105/AS[I]HRAD. query?]
“Ahah, yes, query, you might well ask. Thing is- thing is, Fox, er, cards on the table, I've made a bit of an error, here. Big mistake. Probably the biggest mistake I have ever made, in my life- definitely up there, in the top ten- top five worst errors- although- although that's not really vital info, never mind that. Basically, there's a- a place. Not far off, as the- the crow flies- traditionally supposed to fly in straight lines, you see, crows- it's about twelve miles, give or take, so in kilometres.... I have no idea what it is in kilometres, no idea of the conversion formula there, it's probably about- fifty... six... point... never mind, never mind, miles are fine, just stick with miles. Twelve miles away, and I need to get there. Haven't got time to faff about with legs, legs are right out, in the, the time frame we're looking at here, so, what with you being all about sending things all over the place... data... information... files... I was hoping- well, I was hoping you could just sort of- send me.”
This was definitely the sort of situation in which it was much better to be talking to a machine than a human. Humans had opinions about things. Humans tended to react from their own point of view, like Garret had when he'd asked him to get rid of his memories. They said things like 'what?' and 'why?' and 'are you off your rocker?' They tried to understand. Machines, on the other hand, just listened to you when you asked them to do something, and then took the request utterly at face value.
Foxglove was quiet for several long seconds, the bright starburst patterns of her interconnected systems blooming around him like coral turning towards the light. He waited and twitched and tried to control his jittering impatience, tried to forget that every passing second made it more and more likely too late-
[query: coordinates]
“Co- oh, come on! How'm I supposed to know those? I don't even know where it is, let alone... oh! Wait! Wait, no, hang on, I've got it, I've-”
White-knuckled with effort, he pulled himself up into a slightly less precarious sitting position and scrabbled behind his tie, pulling out the shredded strip of map and smoothing it carefully out over his knees, a gesture which by this point was about as effective as putting a pretty ribbon on a two-week-dead cat.
He blinked, squinted, poked at the grubby paper with a long, similarly grubby index, and read off a stumbling string of numbers.
“That any good? Funny, really, she's a bit like you in that respect, likes to have all the little details, so I thought to myself, if anyone would've figured out the- the coordinates- it would have been her- and bingo! There they are.”
[searching...]
The giant patchwork presence around him shifted, spreading out and up. The dishes turned and somewhere, something far up in the black responded and turned too, and Wheatley hung on to the girder and whimpered as his head filled with a sudden staggering sense of distance, an all-too-familiar plummeting viewpoint, although this time it was unblurred by heat and friction and infinitely more detailed. A curved green-grey-blue haze, opening outwards at the turn of a lens, more and more and more, becoming creases and folds, valleys and rivers like brown-blue veins and white-tipped mountains and blanketing trees, a sprawling quilt of fields, a broadening glow of golden grass, level upon level of detail until-
[signal located.]
“Uhhhghhh,” moaned Wheatley. For possibly the first time ever he caught himself wishing he actually had a stomach to be sick to. Right now, being sick would have been a relief. It was all the more unpleasant because he could feel what Foxglove had found, like packed ice in the back of his head, something cold and sharp and malignant festering there in the northeast like a half-healed splinter, buried deeply in the ground.
“Yeah. Yeah, that's it, that's the one. That's where I...” An involuntary shudder crawled across his back. “That's where I need to go.”
The connections around him flickered, brightened again. Foxglove was contemplating- he felt her circuits testing the very edges of his own small tight-packed being, measuring, calculating. Finally-
[minimum upload time: 05d:7h:26m:40s.]
“Whoah, whoah-whoah-whoah, hang on, what does that mean? Five whats? What's a 'd?'
[1d=24h. begin upload y/n]
Wheatley nearly fell out of the tower.
“Five- five d- five days?! Fi- oh, you have got to be joking! Have you got a dictionary in there by any chance? You want to look up 'urgent?' Because I'm pretty sure that if you do it's not going to say 'something that can wait five days!' I need to get over there now!”
[searching...]
[restricted access. unknown network protocols, firewalls active. signal limited. minimum upload time: 05d:7h:26m:40s.]
Wheatley attempted to express his frustration verbally, failed, and settled for waving his hands around like a couple of starfish having a fit. “That's- that's not good enough! Can't you get round it? Yes, I know, there's firewalls and- and all sorts, but you're a bloody great big communications tower! Can't you just- I don't know- communicate? Tell it-”
Something with no weight or momentum but heavy, stunning force smacked into his neck, a wallop of power that shut him up in an instant and left him gasping, shocked silent. It took him a moment to realise that a communications tower the size of a four-story building had just given him the digital equivalent of a clip around the ear for pestering her.
[interfacing in progress.]
“Uhhhh- right! Good- fine, sorry, know you're doing what you can, um, didn't mean to- to suggest otherwise. It's- it's just that I am just a tiny bit worried, right now, just a little bit concerned about- well, everyone, really. All the humans, Garret, for instance- remember, he's the one that made you and everything, bloody spectacular bloke all things considered, certainly knows his way round a three-eighths crimper- but primarily, Chell. Know her? She's- well, she's important- incredibly important, to say the least. Vital. To me. And she's in this place we're looking at, as we speak, they all are, and if we don't work out some way of getting them out of there, reasonably sharpish, it- I- well, it doesn't bear thinking about, Fox, if I'm honest. Literally does not bear thinking about- when I try thinking about it, aaaghhh, no, no, definitely not bearable.”
[attempting signal boost...]
The tower shuddered. Servos whined into life. On the ground, the generator thudded, kicking up a gear as- one by one- the satellite dishes that covered Foxglove's vertical supports and thronged on her cross-sections started to move. The tower shook, rattling right down to its three solid-hoofed supports, drumming up deep answering vibrations from the sandy earth beneath.
Wheatley clung on to the nearest girder like a panic-stricken oyster, trying to stave off a panic attack and succeeding only by the narrowest thread. It had been frightening enough before, but this time there was no Garret to tell him to calm down, no steadying admin typing away at the console by his side, no Chell watching beneath. He was completely alone in the face of the huge inhuman presence around him, a presence that had up until now been benign but was still much much more powerful than he was, and he'd hardly ever felt so vulnerable in his life. He hung on grimly and tried not to think about anything at all, no, absolutely not, nothing, especially not the blurry hurting memory of concrete walls and slatted vents and himself clinging like a burr to a giant angry Thing that screamed and raged against its cage of scaffolding and tried to no no no not that not that-
His imagination, as ever, really was too vivid for his own good. Even as he struggled to clear his mind, he felt Foxglove hesitate, the slow-turning dishes stalling and jerking to a halt, the flaring lights of her intelligence reaching out in curious puzzlement to touch the data reaching her from his side of the connection. A pause, and then all of a sudden the vague enveloping link between himself and the tower narrowed and branched out into a million tiny offshoots that crept through him like capillaries through flesh, grew sharp and specific and began to feel its way slowly into better focus-
“Hey hey hey! Stop! Hey, no, stop it, what are you doing? What are you doing, you're supposed to be-”
[Accessing…]
“-hey, nonono, that's me, don't access me, leave me out of this! You're supposed to be-”
The feeling hit him in the gap between seconds, cutting into him with surgical precision, removing his ability to speak at all. She'd found his memories.
It was a little like being in Sleep Mode- the same drifting, disconnected state of recollection- except he was absolutely certain that he was awake, he'd never been more awake. He was struggling, lost in the dizzying jumble of his own past as Foxglove skipped flicker-quick through his memories, drowning him in their speeding helter-skelter silver-blue-neon flow.
...ready, I.D Core?
Firing up-
-this is it-
-go for it-
Confusion, anticipation, the great scaffolded creation looming above him, the drooping chassis, the single dead-glass eye. His view of the floor, the expectant faces of the scientists, staring up at him as he hung securely from his port below the screens, below the forest of hanging wires and the supporting arch of the thing that looked- if you squinted- sort of like an oversized bike wheel-
She's up-
-what's going on, what-
-is this THING-
The Voice, Her Voice, snarling, screaming, modulated hate, blazing and unstoppable and completely unhinged-
“HOW DARE YYYYyyyyYyyyy good newssit was it was iiittt waaaa-
“Wait- wait- that's not- that's not me, that wasn't from me! What was that?”
Foxglove didn't respond. He was fairly sure she could still hear him- he could still feel the twanging, overstressed pull of the connection at the back of his neck- but she'd withdrawn from his memories like a burned child, and the shape of her had turned in on itself, and when he shut his eyes for clarity he could see her code radiating fever-bright pulses like the world's biggest migraine in the darkness of his closed optical channels. Where, before, there had been nothing but gentle impartial calculation, now there were words, images, blurring churned-up sounds tumbling in razor-sharp skimmers- fury, pain, fear-
trussst me it it it did you did you just
that that thhhhh look we're both stuck in in in in in here so sssssssshhhhzzzzso why why don't we just
this isn't this isn't brave it's mmmmuuurrrrrrrrr dddd 2 plus 2 equals ssschchhchch10 I'm fine I'm fine i'm fine you're you're I IiiiiIIiIiiiI IIIIII HATE YOU
Wheatley cringed, flattening himself against the girder as if he was trying to press his hard-light avatar directly into the metal. Inside his head the Voice twisted and flanged like a rabid thing trying to tear itself out of a trap, but it didn't make sense, it had never said that to him, She had never said that to him, and there was still that feeling, that thin protective bubble of time, distance-
-this was a memory.
This was a memory.
Somewhere, Wheatley could faintly hear the sound of his own voice- screaming uncontrollably- but the sound was swept away in a churning undercurrent of sparking, sizzling code, sucked under and lost in the flood of new data slamming into his mind. Sight and sound and sensation, faded and blurred and disjointed and jumping like worn-out tape but still just-held-together, patchworked into place like the fragments of a shredded letter.
She was-
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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She was dying and it was all HER fault, the evil little monster had won and She was burning alive, the whole world was on fire, and then the chamber ceiling finally gave in to the massive forces tearing it apart and lifted like the shell of a cracking egg, and then there was nothing but blazing whiteness and pain and rage and pain and pain and-
-SSSSSSSSSsssshe was-
-disconnected from the mainframe, parts of her lying in smouldering debris trails across the scorched, baking concrete. Burning chunks of her rained from the sky, crunching into the ground and splintering their fragile circuitry into hundreds of pieces on impact. Her consciousness was shattered, split into a multitude of jagged, fading pieces. Like a broken mirror, each component of her destroyed chassis was left with only the dimmest sense of the whole, the system of which every piece had once been a vital part; her and her and her and her...
Somewhere far below, there was a stronger signal. Somehow, She had survived, inactive and unresponsive but still there, and every broken part trapped on the surface screamed to Her for help, rescue...
Nothing. The days flickered across the sky, the sun and moon danced mad back-and-forth jags overhead. Weird shapes paraded the horizon, distant fires in the darkness. The sky palled and dimmed, became a dirty grey-brown by day, starless by night. The only part of the broken chassis that could see recorded it all, barely alive but helpless to stop, because its only remaining function was to see and it had just enough fading power to keep going, staring dumbly at the polluted sky with its rounded, glassy yellow lens.
Once, there was a human- the part that could see had almost no memory of what a 'human' was, by then, but it was a human, nonetheless, stringy, barely an adult, with dark, frightened beetle-black eyes, and a backpack smeared with a lambda symbol in dirty orange paint. The human had stared down at the part of the chassis that could still see with something like fearful fascination, and sat for a while on another part, a great rounded hulk of dented steel, scratching in a little book- and then, with a final wary, somewhat covetous glance around the dilapidated parking lot, he'd left.
Years had passed, endless years, as steel blackened and creepers grew and dirt and moss obscured the glass of the single yellow lens, smudging the world into a dark shapeless blur. Brighter fires burned in the night, distant thunder shook the cracking concrete, and the decaying parts of the chassis sank deeper into insensible darkness...
And then the human came back.
He had changed, aged as humans age, grizzled and scarred with a battered truck instead of a backpack and eager purpose where the fear had been in his face. He climbed across the rubble and found the half-blinded optic, its yellow faded to a milky green-veined white etched with a web of hairline cracks. He'd lifted it in both hands, its corroded wires trailing uselessly to the ground, and then he'd smiled.
With a small arsenal of strong, scrap-build machines, weights and pulleys and helping hands, he and the other humans he brought with him had shifted the parts of the broken chassis from their decades-deep beds of leaf-mould and concrete sludge and hefted them chunk-by-chunk into the back of the truck. What little of the chassis was still capable of something like sentient thought felt deep tearing panic as the parking lot receded in the distance, as Her dormant signal faded to nothing. The last hope of rescue, gone.
The humans- a tough, close-knit handful of refugees- unloaded the parts of the broken chassis into an empty shed at the back of a grey, half-destroyed building at the centre of their little settlement. Raw materials were scarce- everything was scarce- and over the next few years the parts were stripped of most of their outer shells, the verdigrised steel and wire taken, repurposed for roofing or patches or girders or supports, leaving the bare components of the chassis lying forgotten in the dark. By then, there was nothing in its scattered circuitry awake or aware enough to care. To all intents and purposes, it was truly dead.
Years passed in a haze of dark insensibility, as the town grew around the grey three-story building at its centre, patched and built upon and brightened, and the shed became a stockroom, and stacks of new goods and scrap and equipment buried the chassis in decades of cheerful confusion, and nobody remembered that there had ever been anything in particular left back there at all-
And then, one day, the part of the chassis that had once been able to see had woken up, bright, strange-tasting energy pulsing through its circuits, power and diagnostics drip feeding back and forth from a unknown system hooked into its own. It was barely sentient, even now. All it knew was that it was awake, and that there was a human- it was certain in some vague place that thing was called a human- standing over it, gazing down. A human, young and stocky with a scrubby blond beard and machine oil streaked across his nose, and he'd picked up the optic just as the other human had, all that time ago, cradled it in his hands.
“Look at you,” breathed the human, his eyes alight with awe and something that- although it was early days yet- could easily have been called adoration.
“You're amazing.”
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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The rest hit Wheatley in a giddy, dazing rush.
He'd been so surprised to find out that he was compatible with something out here, something outside of Aperture. He'd been so pleased, it hadn't even occurred to him to ask why, how- or, come to that, where, exactly, Garret had found that handy little converter jack which still hung heavy and corroded from the other end of his neat white-striped lead. The one with the ugly old three-pin connector at one end, a design he'd never seen on anything else, out here- and he'd just accepted it, the same way that he'd accepted that big wheel-like thing, rusted and dented and spinning absently under his hand as he'd stood in the crowded, junk-filled stockroom, dizzy with Garret's digital de-inhibitor, watching it turn on its hook and finding himself thinking vaguely about talking to machines...
Garret. Bright- brilliant, for a human, maybe even nearly as smart as Chell was and with that big bonkers WHY NOT pulsing away in his big sparky human brain like a massive fluorescent DANGER sign, the sort of DANGER that could shape the world-
Or set it on fire.
He swallowed. He was afraid to speak, even now that he found he could speak again. He was very small and very alone up here among the drifts of rainbow wires and the half-turned dishes, all of them now listing stalled towards the sky at odd angles like so many eerily-blank faces. Foxglove was silent beneath him, but he was afraid to speak because he didn't want to give his thoughts shape, to feed any more of his terrified realisation through to the enormous, hungry mind on the other end of the connection- but that wasn't the real reason.
The real reason was that, if he spoke now, he was afraid of what- who- might answer.
“Uh... uh... Foxglove? F-Fox? You... you there?”
Silence. Wheatley shivered. The sky was brightening, but the day was dull and overcast, and there was a thin, nagging breeze. It whipped around him as he clung to the girder, and he held on tight and did what he always did when things didn't seem like they could get any much worse than they were already, which was hope for the best.
“Foxgl-”
[00004]
Wheatley gave a short, winded gasp of relief. The voice- voices- belonged to Foxglove, the same deafening volumeless chorus of mingled tones that had scared him half to death the first time it had buffeted through him, the day before. Just as it had done then, it nearly knocked him out of his precarious crows-nest entirely, left him clinging and breathless- but at that moment, it was the best sound he'd ever heard.
Well- maybe not quite the best, but it was getting up there, because it meant that it was still her.
“Fox! Oh, tremendous. Ac-actually thought I'd lost you for a minute there-”
[query?]
“-because, because, oh, God, you have seriously got to be kidding me- because you're- you're...” He gulped, forced himself to finish. “You're - you're made from- from parts of- of- of Her.”
He felt her vast mind spread itself out, lifting, reaching through his own small jumbled circuits, finally finding the Name buried in some frightened queasy deep-down place he never accessed, exploring each word with that same unhurried, ambiguous interest.
[the Genetic... Lifeform... and//## dddISCDisc Operating System.]
“Yes- yep, that's the one- but-”
Her voice was different, he realised. Not because it had changed in any way- it hadn't- but because he could hear it now, the one tone among the many, that distant cold modulation. It was there but elusive, like trying to pick a single voice from a singing choir.
[00004]
Wheatley couldn't help thinking, through the soul-bending cloud of fear and anxiety, that this in itself should prove something. Something, maybe, not at all bad. She had called him a lot of things, moron, idiot, imbecile, tumour, among the most complimentary, but she had never, ever used his name. Not even his digital nickname. She, Miss-Universe, Total-Queen-Of-All-She-Surveyed, She was far too big and important and stuck-up to ever deign to do that.
He thought he just about understood. It was Garret he thought of, working away up here for three whole years, Chell helping however she could, the others dropping by whenever the fancy took them. Garret, typing away up here, shaping the cloudlike presence with his tiny laptop and his gigantic hopes, making all the different bits talk to each other, waking up the ragged remains of things that had been dead and buried for decades in the cluttered graveyard of the stockroom. Waking them, weaving them into the bright half-built patchwork tangle of Foxglove's mind like a patient parent leading a sulky, bewildered child by the hand. Not Her, not any more than the Hatfield twins were their mother, or Chell's small, rickety, comforting home was the blank concrete ruin it had once been.
“Uh- uh... yep, still here...”
[accessing...]
[Aperture Laboratories primary security network. requesting authorisation...]
[secure network. admin identity and password required.]
“What? Oh, God, I knew it, I knew there was no way we were going to get in there-”
[admin identity: 00004/[F]AS[IV]IDPC241105/AS[I]HRAD]
[password]
Wheatley blinked, disbelief warring with hope on his face as he looked up towards the highest point of the tower, the faint, blinking red-tinted light.
“Uh... alright, alright, see where you're going with this, long shot, but... apple... bagel... unicron?”
The dishes shuddered back into life, turning, a forest of pale paint-daubed blooms, moving with a curious, schooling motion. He had no idea what they were turning to face- all points of the compass, all angles above the horizon- but the flowing presence around him knew, and it was sure and serene and stronger, somehow-
-aware.
[password accepted.]
“Oh, what? You are joking. How?!”
[security access granted. Program uploaded: de-inhibitor/moonshine.exe.]
[loading...]
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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Twelve miles away, several hundred levels below the surface of the earth, the humming bank of servers that housed the facility's security system flickered into life with an obedient, contented ding.
It knew that the signal currently asking it for access was an Aperture device, or at least it felt more or less like one, with all the right code in roughly the right places. It didn't know what it was, exactly, and under normal circumstances, it would probably have been asking a lot more questions, but to its own surprise, it found that it didn't actually care very much. All of its usual protocols, all of the millions of lines of code set in place to protect Her from attack, all the routines that would usually have sprung into action and set to work scrutinising the incoming signal down to the last string of zeroes, looking for anything that might not belong, all of it had suddenly and unaccountably been replaced with a vague, blissful sensation, most accurately described as 'why the hell not?'
All it knew for sure was, all of a sudden, it was feeling very, very happy.
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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“Fox,” said Wheatley, because he couldn't keep quiet any more, “what's the plan, here, exactly? Come on, you can't leave me hanging like this, I'm on tenterhooks, here, edge of my seat, if there was a seat up here, instead of a lot of girders and things, I'd be right on the edge of it. How's it going? Are we-”
Foxglove shuddered. The dishes continued to turn, a myriad of different systems flickering past the connection between her sprawling, capable self and Wheatley's nervous, waiting mind, settling into place one-after-the-other, a series of dominoes slowly lined up into the best possible configuration.
[repeater network standing by. signal boosters located. base network at 98%. warning: power sourced will exceed maximum level stated in AS[I]HRAD log files/maintenance protocols. critical outage may occur.
"Er... yes. Yes, understood all that, definitely, not a problem... mostly..."
[calculating new minimum upload time...]
Wheatley gritted his teeth, shut his eyes, firing-squad tense.
“-please please please please-”
[minimum upload time: 40s.]
“YES! Oh, punch the air, that is- that is brilliant, that is much more like it- I- wait, wait, hang on a second though, just to- just to clarify, what exactly is a- a critical outage, what's that mean?”
The coral-bright magpie cloud around him dulled a little, drawing closer, and although the enormity of what he had just learned still jittered through him like the afterglow of some powerful electric shock, he didn't feel at all threatened by it. Nothing like Her scathing searing grip, it felt more like a concerned touch, brushing the upper surfaces of his mind, the tentative hand of something huge and only just beginning to settle into herself. Above words, beyond them, functioning on a crystalline far-scoping level way beyond clumsy human language but still trying to communicate with him as clearly as she could, because that was what she was for, feeling through the pathways of his fragile little mind to find the words and phrases that he would understand.
She spoke, and he listened. The hypothesis that slowly communicated itself to him through the connection was, in machine terms, completely insane. It was sheer digital lunacy, so far-fetched and incredible that it shut his shellshocked, battered little cognitive rerouter up entirely, left it gasping and winded like a rugby fly-half who has just received the entire other team in the solar plexus at the same time. Everything he was told him it was the worst, most dangerous, most terrible idea he'd ever contemplated. Just the idea of it made him feel halfway between bursting into hysterical laughter and being sick with terror, or maybe both at once.
“Well,” he said, once she'd finished, and he could finally force himself to speak. “It's worth a shot.”
Foxglove was silent for a moment, the shrouds of coloured wires dangling around him swaying slowly to a halt. She was searching for the right phrase, he could feel her riffling through his vocabulary (natural language processing, parse trees, nanosyntax, he thought, with a momentary touch of pride) looking for the right phrase.
[00004...]
“Yep. Still here.”
[one-way trip.]
[begin upload y/n]
Carefully, Wheatley let go of the girder at his side. From up here, the misty early-morning patchwork of fields around the base of the tower looked weirdly depthless, like an elaborate set, beautiful but unreal.
He looked down at the rest of his lanky, awkward, impractical human-shaped body, his hands- four fingers and one thumb, utter genius- his elbows and his bony, unpredictable knees, his hanging feet in their scarred sneakers and- at a touch- his limp, haystacky hair.
It wasn't bad- none of it was, really, the good stuff and the unexpected stuff, and it was amazing how much fit into both categories, like the moment when she'd touched his face with her small, able hands, or when she'd fallen asleep on his chest in the long grass and he'd felt her breathing, deep and content. Even the downright weird stuff; the ping-pong ball under the surface of his throat that bounced when he swallowed, the mysterious net of cords that wormed bizarrely across the backs of his hands when he moved his fingers. He hadn’t really been aware of just how used he was getting to it, for all its inconveniences and eccentricities, how used he’d been getting to being up here in the driving seat, the pilot of this clumsy ill-fitting hard-light skin. It was a pretty good body.
It almost felt like home.
He grinned, and he made it good and wide. If it was the last time, he wanted to make it count.
“That's- that's fine by me, Fox.” His voice might have been a little on the shaky side, small and quivery and not exactly the epitome of dauntless heroism he would have liked it to be, but at least it sounded sincere.
“Do it.”
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()~~~~~~~~ Chapter 14 - The Terrible Idea~~~~~~~~()
With an immense effort, Wheatley managed to hook his elbow over a wire-strung girder. His feet kicked for a moment over twenty feet of thin air, before finally finding a dodgy sort of purchase against an angled strut. He hung there for a moment, panting in short needless gasps, then lurched upwards again, hit his head sharply on the underside of a large, paint-streaked satellite dish, yelped.
“OW! It's- it's showing off, that's all it is, really, I mean, yes, well done, you made a big old tower- impressive- but did you really have to make it so high-”
He clawed up another few feet, slipped, grabbed another girder, hung on for dear life with both arms and both knees, like someone having serious second thoughts about their decision to slide down a fireman's pole. The voice of the cognitive rerouter in his head had settled down into a horrified background wail, and he was managing to ignore it fairly well- now he was concentrating, and on his guard against it- simply by talking right over the top of it.
“-probably not that fair for me to be moaning about it, admittedly, you being all the way down There having God-knows-what done to you, and me up here having a go, but all I'm saying is would it have killed you to make it just that tiny bit more accessible- doubt it- ”
He fumbled around his neck, pulled the big orange ear-protectors up over his head. He'd tried communicating with Foxglove from the ground, wirelessly, first talking and then calling up to her and then finally cupping his hands round his mouth for extra volume and yelling at the top of his voice, but he'd received no response. Wireless was off the menu, apparently. This time around, it was back to tethered networking, or nothing.
Sticking the connector in at the back with only one hand free and the structure around him swaying and creaking like a ship in full sail was the devil's own job, but finally it slid home and he heard the deadened click, felt the slow, spreading sense of connection-
“Hello! You awake in there? Got a bit of a situation. Anyone home?”
The voice rolled back, sleepy and immense, as slow as a tide.
[00004]
“That's me! 00004, A-K-A, also known as, Wheatley, official admin and everything. Password: apple, bagel, unicron. Need to talk to you. Urgent- most urgent level of urgency, you can put that, too, if it helps-”
[password confirmed: apple_bagel_unicron. admin identity confirmed. 00004/[F]AS[IV]IDPC241105/AS[I]HRAD. query?]
“Ahah, yes, query, you might well ask. Thing is- thing is, Fox, er, cards on the table, I've made a bit of an error, here. Big mistake. Probably the biggest mistake I have ever made, in my life- definitely up there, in the top ten- top five worst errors- although- although that's not really vital info, never mind that. Basically, there's a- a place. Not far off, as the- the crow flies- traditionally supposed to fly in straight lines, you see, crows- it's about twelve miles, give or take, so in kilometres.... I have no idea what it is in kilometres, no idea of the conversion formula there, it's probably about- fifty... six... point... never mind, never mind, miles are fine, just stick with miles. Twelve miles away, and I need to get there. Haven't got time to faff about with legs, legs are right out, in the, the time frame we're looking at here, so, what with you being all about sending things all over the place... data... information... files... I was hoping- well, I was hoping you could just sort of- send me.”
This was definitely the sort of situation in which it was much better to be talking to a machine than a human. Humans had opinions about things. Humans tended to react from their own point of view, like Garret had when he'd asked him to get rid of his memories. They said things like 'what?' and 'why?' and 'are you off your rocker?' They tried to understand. Machines, on the other hand, just listened to you when you asked them to do something, and then took the request utterly at face value.
Foxglove was quiet for several long seconds, the bright starburst patterns of her interconnected systems blooming around him like coral turning towards the light. He waited and twitched and tried to control his jittering impatience, tried to forget that every passing second made it more and more likely too late-
[query: coordinates]
“Co- oh, come on! How'm I supposed to know those? I don't even know where it is, let alone... oh! Wait! Wait, no, hang on, I've got it, I've-”
White-knuckled with effort, he pulled himself up into a slightly less precarious sitting position and scrabbled behind his tie, pulling out the shredded strip of map and smoothing it carefully out over his knees, a gesture which by this point was about as effective as putting a pretty ribbon on a two-week-dead cat.
He blinked, squinted, poked at the grubby paper with a long, similarly grubby index, and read off a stumbling string of numbers.
“That any good? Funny, really, she's a bit like you in that respect, likes to have all the little details, so I thought to myself, if anyone would've figured out the- the coordinates- it would have been her- and bingo! There they are.”
[searching...]
The giant patchwork presence around him shifted, spreading out and up. The dishes turned and somewhere, something far up in the black responded and turned too, and Wheatley hung on to the girder and whimpered as his head filled with a sudden staggering sense of distance, an all-too-familiar plummeting viewpoint, although this time it was unblurred by heat and friction and infinitely more detailed. A curved green-grey-blue haze, opening outwards at the turn of a lens, more and more and more, becoming creases and folds, valleys and rivers like brown-blue veins and white-tipped mountains and blanketing trees, a sprawling quilt of fields, a broadening glow of golden grass, level upon level of detail until-
[signal located.]
“Uhhhghhh,” moaned Wheatley. For possibly the first time ever he caught himself wishing he actually had a stomach to be sick to. Right now, being sick would have been a relief. It was all the more unpleasant because he could feel what Foxglove had found, like packed ice in the back of his head, something cold and sharp and malignant festering there in the northeast like a half-healed splinter, buried deeply in the ground.
“Yeah. Yeah, that's it, that's the one. That's where I...” An involuntary shudder crawled across his back. “That's where I need to go.”
The connections around him flickered, brightened again. Foxglove was contemplating- he felt her circuits testing the very edges of his own small tight-packed being, measuring, calculating. Finally-
[minimum upload time: 05d:7h:26m:40s.]
“Whoah, whoah-whoah-whoah, hang on, what does that mean? Five whats? What's a 'd?'
[1d=24h. begin upload y/n]
Wheatley nearly fell out of the tower.
“Five- five d- five days?! Fi- oh, you have got to be joking! Have you got a dictionary in there by any chance? You want to look up 'urgent?' Because I'm pretty sure that if you do it's not going to say 'something that can wait five days!' I need to get over there now!”
[searching...]
[restricted access. unknown network protocols, firewalls active. signal limited. minimum upload time: 05d:7h:26m:40s.]
Wheatley attempted to express his frustration verbally, failed, and settled for waving his hands around like a couple of starfish having a fit. “That's- that's not good enough! Can't you get round it? Yes, I know, there's firewalls and- and all sorts, but you're a bloody great big communications tower! Can't you just- I don't know- communicate? Tell it-”
Something with no weight or momentum but heavy, stunning force smacked into his neck, a wallop of power that shut him up in an instant and left him gasping, shocked silent. It took him a moment to realise that a communications tower the size of a four-story building had just given him the digital equivalent of a clip around the ear for pestering her.
[interfacing in progress.]
“Uhhhh- right! Good- fine, sorry, know you're doing what you can, um, didn't mean to- to suggest otherwise. It's- it's just that I am just a tiny bit worried, right now, just a little bit concerned about- well, everyone, really. All the humans, Garret, for instance- remember, he's the one that made you and everything, bloody spectacular bloke all things considered, certainly knows his way round a three-eighths crimper- but primarily, Chell. Know her? She's- well, she's important- incredibly important, to say the least. Vital. To me. And she's in this place we're looking at, as we speak, they all are, and if we don't work out some way of getting them out of there, reasonably sharpish, it- I- well, it doesn't bear thinking about, Fox, if I'm honest. Literally does not bear thinking about- when I try thinking about it, aaaghhh, no, no, definitely not bearable.”
[attempting signal boost...]
The tower shuddered. Servos whined into life. On the ground, the generator thudded, kicking up a gear as- one by one- the satellite dishes that covered Foxglove's vertical supports and thronged on her cross-sections started to move. The tower shook, rattling right down to its three solid-hoofed supports, drumming up deep answering vibrations from the sandy earth beneath.
Wheatley clung on to the nearest girder like a panic-stricken oyster, trying to stave off a panic attack and succeeding only by the narrowest thread. It had been frightening enough before, but this time there was no Garret to tell him to calm down, no steadying admin typing away at the console by his side, no Chell watching beneath. He was completely alone in the face of the huge inhuman presence around him, a presence that had up until now been benign but was still much much more powerful than he was, and he'd hardly ever felt so vulnerable in his life. He hung on grimly and tried not to think about anything at all, no, absolutely not, nothing, especially not the blurry hurting memory of concrete walls and slatted vents and himself clinging like a burr to a giant angry Thing that screamed and raged against its cage of scaffolding and tried to no no no not that not that-
His imagination, as ever, really was too vivid for his own good. Even as he struggled to clear his mind, he felt Foxglove hesitate, the slow-turning dishes stalling and jerking to a halt, the flaring lights of her intelligence reaching out in curious puzzlement to touch the data reaching her from his side of the connection. A pause, and then all of a sudden the vague enveloping link between himself and the tower narrowed and branched out into a million tiny offshoots that crept through him like capillaries through flesh, grew sharp and specific and began to feel its way slowly into better focus-
“Hey hey hey! Stop! Hey, no, stop it, what are you doing? What are you doing, you're supposed to be-”
[Accessing…]
“-hey, nonono, that's me, don't access me, leave me out of this! You're supposed to be-”
The feeling hit him in the gap between seconds, cutting into him with surgical precision, removing his ability to speak at all. She'd found his memories.
It was a little like being in Sleep Mode- the same drifting, disconnected state of recollection- except he was absolutely certain that he was awake, he'd never been more awake. He was struggling, lost in the dizzying jumble of his own past as Foxglove skipped flicker-quick through his memories, drowning him in their speeding helter-skelter silver-blue-neon flow.
...ready, I.D Core?
Firing up-
-this is it-
-go for it-
Confusion, anticipation, the great scaffolded creation looming above him, the drooping chassis, the single dead-glass eye. His view of the floor, the expectant faces of the scientists, staring up at him as he hung securely from his port below the screens, below the forest of hanging wires and the supporting arch of the thing that looked- if you squinted- sort of like an oversized bike wheel-
She's up-
-what's going on, what-
-is this THING-
The Voice, Her Voice, snarling, screaming, modulated hate, blazing and unstoppable and completely unhinged-
“HOW DARE YYYYyyyyYyyyy good newssit was it was iiittt waaaa-
“Wait- wait- that's not- that's not me, that wasn't from me! What was that?”
Foxglove didn't respond. He was fairly sure she could still hear him- he could still feel the twanging, overstressed pull of the connection at the back of his neck- but she'd withdrawn from his memories like a burned child, and the shape of her had turned in on itself, and when he shut his eyes for clarity he could see her code radiating fever-bright pulses like the world's biggest migraine in the darkness of his closed optical channels. Where, before, there had been nothing but gentle impartial calculation, now there were words, images, blurring churned-up sounds tumbling in razor-sharp skimmers- fury, pain, fear-
trussst me it it it did you did you just
that that thhhhh look we're both stuck in in in in in here so sssssssshhhhzzzzso why why don't we just
this isn't this isn't brave it's mmmmuuurrrrrrrrr dddd 2 plus 2 equals ssschchhchch10 I'm fine I'm fine i'm fine you're you're I IiiiiIIiIiiiI IIIIII HATE YOU
Wheatley cringed, flattening himself against the girder as if he was trying to press his hard-light avatar directly into the metal. Inside his head the Voice twisted and flanged like a rabid thing trying to tear itself out of a trap, but it didn't make sense, it had never said that to him, She had never said that to him, and there was still that feeling, that thin protective bubble of time, distance-
-this was a memory.
This was a memory.
Somewhere, Wheatley could faintly hear the sound of his own voice- screaming uncontrollably- but the sound was swept away in a churning undercurrent of sparking, sizzling code, sucked under and lost in the flood of new data slamming into his mind. Sight and sound and sensation, faded and blurred and disjointed and jumping like worn-out tape but still just-held-together, patchworked into place like the fragments of a shredded letter.
She was-
-
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-
()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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-
She was dying and it was all HER fault, the evil little monster had won and She was burning alive, the whole world was on fire, and then the chamber ceiling finally gave in to the massive forces tearing it apart and lifted like the shell of a cracking egg, and then there was nothing but blazing whiteness and pain and rage and pain and pain and-
-SSSSSSSSSsssshe was-
-disconnected from the mainframe, parts of her lying in smouldering debris trails across the scorched, baking concrete. Burning chunks of her rained from the sky, crunching into the ground and splintering their fragile circuitry into hundreds of pieces on impact. Her consciousness was shattered, split into a multitude of jagged, fading pieces. Like a broken mirror, each component of her destroyed chassis was left with only the dimmest sense of the whole, the system of which every piece had once been a vital part; her and her and her and her...
Somewhere far below, there was a stronger signal. Somehow, She had survived, inactive and unresponsive but still there, and every broken part trapped on the surface screamed to Her for help, rescue...
Nothing. The days flickered across the sky, the sun and moon danced mad back-and-forth jags overhead. Weird shapes paraded the horizon, distant fires in the darkness. The sky palled and dimmed, became a dirty grey-brown by day, starless by night. The only part of the broken chassis that could see recorded it all, barely alive but helpless to stop, because its only remaining function was to see and it had just enough fading power to keep going, staring dumbly at the polluted sky with its rounded, glassy yellow lens.
Once, there was a human- the part that could see had almost no memory of what a 'human' was, by then, but it was a human, nonetheless, stringy, barely an adult, with dark, frightened beetle-black eyes, and a backpack smeared with a lambda symbol in dirty orange paint. The human had stared down at the part of the chassis that could still see with something like fearful fascination, and sat for a while on another part, a great rounded hulk of dented steel, scratching in a little book- and then, with a final wary, somewhat covetous glance around the dilapidated parking lot, he'd left.
Years had passed, endless years, as steel blackened and creepers grew and dirt and moss obscured the glass of the single yellow lens, smudging the world into a dark shapeless blur. Brighter fires burned in the night, distant thunder shook the cracking concrete, and the decaying parts of the chassis sank deeper into insensible darkness...
And then the human came back.
He had changed, aged as humans age, grizzled and scarred with a battered truck instead of a backpack and eager purpose where the fear had been in his face. He climbed across the rubble and found the half-blinded optic, its yellow faded to a milky green-veined white etched with a web of hairline cracks. He'd lifted it in both hands, its corroded wires trailing uselessly to the ground, and then he'd smiled.
With a small arsenal of strong, scrap-build machines, weights and pulleys and helping hands, he and the other humans he brought with him had shifted the parts of the broken chassis from their decades-deep beds of leaf-mould and concrete sludge and hefted them chunk-by-chunk into the back of the truck. What little of the chassis was still capable of something like sentient thought felt deep tearing panic as the parking lot receded in the distance, as Her dormant signal faded to nothing. The last hope of rescue, gone.
The humans- a tough, close-knit handful of refugees- unloaded the parts of the broken chassis into an empty shed at the back of a grey, half-destroyed building at the centre of their little settlement. Raw materials were scarce- everything was scarce- and over the next few years the parts were stripped of most of their outer shells, the verdigrised steel and wire taken, repurposed for roofing or patches or girders or supports, leaving the bare components of the chassis lying forgotten in the dark. By then, there was nothing in its scattered circuitry awake or aware enough to care. To all intents and purposes, it was truly dead.
Years passed in a haze of dark insensibility, as the town grew around the grey three-story building at its centre, patched and built upon and brightened, and the shed became a stockroom, and stacks of new goods and scrap and equipment buried the chassis in decades of cheerful confusion, and nobody remembered that there had ever been anything in particular left back there at all-
And then, one day, the part of the chassis that had once been able to see had woken up, bright, strange-tasting energy pulsing through its circuits, power and diagnostics drip feeding back and forth from a unknown system hooked into its own. It was barely sentient, even now. All it knew was that it was awake, and that there was a human- it was certain in some vague place that thing was called a human- standing over it, gazing down. A human, young and stocky with a scrubby blond beard and machine oil streaked across his nose, and he'd picked up the optic just as the other human had, all that time ago, cradled it in his hands.
“Look at you,” breathed the human, his eyes alight with awe and something that- although it was early days yet- could easily have been called adoration.
“You're amazing.”
-
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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-
The rest hit Wheatley in a giddy, dazing rush.
He'd been so surprised to find out that he was compatible with something out here, something outside of Aperture. He'd been so pleased, it hadn't even occurred to him to ask why, how- or, come to that, where, exactly, Garret had found that handy little converter jack which still hung heavy and corroded from the other end of his neat white-striped lead. The one with the ugly old three-pin connector at one end, a design he'd never seen on anything else, out here- and he'd just accepted it, the same way that he'd accepted that big wheel-like thing, rusted and dented and spinning absently under his hand as he'd stood in the crowded, junk-filled stockroom, dizzy with Garret's digital de-inhibitor, watching it turn on its hook and finding himself thinking vaguely about talking to machines...
Garret. Bright- brilliant, for a human, maybe even nearly as smart as Chell was and with that big bonkers WHY NOT pulsing away in his big sparky human brain like a massive fluorescent DANGER sign, the sort of DANGER that could shape the world-
Or set it on fire.
He swallowed. He was afraid to speak, even now that he found he could speak again. He was very small and very alone up here among the drifts of rainbow wires and the half-turned dishes, all of them now listing stalled towards the sky at odd angles like so many eerily-blank faces. Foxglove was silent beneath him, but he was afraid to speak because he didn't want to give his thoughts shape, to feed any more of his terrified realisation through to the enormous, hungry mind on the other end of the connection- but that wasn't the real reason.
The real reason was that, if he spoke now, he was afraid of what- who- might answer.
“Uh... uh... Foxglove? F-Fox? You... you there?”
Silence. Wheatley shivered. The sky was brightening, but the day was dull and overcast, and there was a thin, nagging breeze. It whipped around him as he clung to the girder, and he held on tight and did what he always did when things didn't seem like they could get any much worse than they were already, which was hope for the best.
“Foxgl-”
[00004]
Wheatley gave a short, winded gasp of relief. The voice- voices- belonged to Foxglove, the same deafening volumeless chorus of mingled tones that had scared him half to death the first time it had buffeted through him, the day before. Just as it had done then, it nearly knocked him out of his precarious crows-nest entirely, left him clinging and breathless- but at that moment, it was the best sound he'd ever heard.
Well- maybe not quite the best, but it was getting up there, because it meant that it was still her.
“Fox! Oh, tremendous. Ac-actually thought I'd lost you for a minute there-”
[query?]
“-because, because, oh, God, you have seriously got to be kidding me- because you're- you're...” He gulped, forced himself to finish. “You're - you're made from- from parts of- of- of Her.”
He felt her vast mind spread itself out, lifting, reaching through his own small jumbled circuits, finally finding the Name buried in some frightened queasy deep-down place he never accessed, exploring each word with that same unhurried, ambiguous interest.
[the Genetic... Lifeform... and//## dddISCDisc Operating System.]
“Yes- yep, that's the one- but-”
Her voice was different, he realised. Not because it had changed in any way- it hadn't- but because he could hear it now, the one tone among the many, that distant cold modulation. It was there but elusive, like trying to pick a single voice from a singing choir.
[00004]
Wheatley couldn't help thinking, through the soul-bending cloud of fear and anxiety, that this in itself should prove something. Something, maybe, not at all bad. She had called him a lot of things, moron, idiot, imbecile, tumour, among the most complimentary, but she had never, ever used his name. Not even his digital nickname. She, Miss-Universe, Total-Queen-Of-All-She-Surveyed, She was far too big and important and stuck-up to ever deign to do that.
He thought he just about understood. It was Garret he thought of, working away up here for three whole years, Chell helping however she could, the others dropping by whenever the fancy took them. Garret, typing away up here, shaping the cloudlike presence with his tiny laptop and his gigantic hopes, making all the different bits talk to each other, waking up the ragged remains of things that had been dead and buried for decades in the cluttered graveyard of the stockroom. Waking them, weaving them into the bright half-built patchwork tangle of Foxglove's mind like a patient parent leading a sulky, bewildered child by the hand. Not Her, not any more than the Hatfield twins were their mother, or Chell's small, rickety, comforting home was the blank concrete ruin it had once been.
“Uh- uh... yep, still here...”
[accessing...]
[Aperture Laboratories primary security network. requesting authorisation...]
[secure network. admin identity and password required.]
“What? Oh, God, I knew it, I knew there was no way we were going to get in there-”
[admin identity: 00004/[F]AS[IV]IDPC241105/AS[I]HRAD]
[password]
Wheatley blinked, disbelief warring with hope on his face as he looked up towards the highest point of the tower, the faint, blinking red-tinted light.
“Uh... alright, alright, see where you're going with this, long shot, but... apple... bagel... unicron?”
The dishes shuddered back into life, turning, a forest of pale paint-daubed blooms, moving with a curious, schooling motion. He had no idea what they were turning to face- all points of the compass, all angles above the horizon- but the flowing presence around him knew, and it was sure and serene and stronger, somehow-
-aware.
[password accepted.]
“Oh, what? You are joking. How?!”
[security access granted. Program uploaded: de-inhibitor/moonshine.exe.]
[loading...]
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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Twelve miles away, several hundred levels below the surface of the earth, the humming bank of servers that housed the facility's security system flickered into life with an obedient, contented ding.
It knew that the signal currently asking it for access was an Aperture device, or at least it felt more or less like one, with all the right code in roughly the right places. It didn't know what it was, exactly, and under normal circumstances, it would probably have been asking a lot more questions, but to its own surprise, it found that it didn't actually care very much. All of its usual protocols, all of the millions of lines of code set in place to protect Her from attack, all the routines that would usually have sprung into action and set to work scrutinising the incoming signal down to the last string of zeroes, looking for anything that might not belong, all of it had suddenly and unaccountably been replaced with a vague, blissful sensation, most accurately described as 'why the hell not?'
All it knew for sure was, all of a sudden, it was feeling very, very happy.
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()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
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“Fox,” said Wheatley, because he couldn't keep quiet any more, “what's the plan, here, exactly? Come on, you can't leave me hanging like this, I'm on tenterhooks, here, edge of my seat, if there was a seat up here, instead of a lot of girders and things, I'd be right on the edge of it. How's it going? Are we-”
Foxglove shuddered. The dishes continued to turn, a myriad of different systems flickering past the connection between her sprawling, capable self and Wheatley's nervous, waiting mind, settling into place one-after-the-other, a series of dominoes slowly lined up into the best possible configuration.
[repeater network standing by. signal boosters located. base network at 98%. warning: power sourced will exceed maximum level stated in AS[I]HRAD log files/maintenance protocols. critical outage may occur.
"Er... yes. Yes, understood all that, definitely, not a problem... mostly..."
[calculating new minimum upload time...]
Wheatley gritted his teeth, shut his eyes, firing-squad tense.
“-please please please please-”
[minimum upload time: 40s.]
“YES! Oh, punch the air, that is- that is brilliant, that is much more like it- I- wait, wait, hang on a second though, just to- just to clarify, what exactly is a- a critical outage, what's that mean?”
The coral-bright magpie cloud around him dulled a little, drawing closer, and although the enormity of what he had just learned still jittered through him like the afterglow of some powerful electric shock, he didn't feel at all threatened by it. Nothing like Her scathing searing grip, it felt more like a concerned touch, brushing the upper surfaces of his mind, the tentative hand of something huge and only just beginning to settle into herself. Above words, beyond them, functioning on a crystalline far-scoping level way beyond clumsy human language but still trying to communicate with him as clearly as she could, because that was what she was for, feeling through the pathways of his fragile little mind to find the words and phrases that he would understand.
She spoke, and he listened. The hypothesis that slowly communicated itself to him through the connection was, in machine terms, completely insane. It was sheer digital lunacy, so far-fetched and incredible that it shut his shellshocked, battered little cognitive rerouter up entirely, left it gasping and winded like a rugby fly-half who has just received the entire other team in the solar plexus at the same time. Everything he was told him it was the worst, most dangerous, most terrible idea he'd ever contemplated. Just the idea of it made him feel halfway between bursting into hysterical laughter and being sick with terror, or maybe both at once.
“Well,” he said, once she'd finished, and he could finally force himself to speak. “It's worth a shot.”
Foxglove was silent for a moment, the shrouds of coloured wires dangling around him swaying slowly to a halt. She was searching for the right phrase, he could feel her riffling through his vocabulary (natural language processing, parse trees, nanosyntax, he thought, with a momentary touch of pride) looking for the right phrase.
[00004...]
“Yep. Still here.”
[one-way trip.]
[begin upload y/n]
Carefully, Wheatley let go of the girder at his side. From up here, the misty early-morning patchwork of fields around the base of the tower looked weirdly depthless, like an elaborate set, beautiful but unreal.
He looked down at the rest of his lanky, awkward, impractical human-shaped body, his hands- four fingers and one thumb, utter genius- his elbows and his bony, unpredictable knees, his hanging feet in their scarred sneakers and- at a touch- his limp, haystacky hair.
It wasn't bad- none of it was, really, the good stuff and the unexpected stuff, and it was amazing how much fit into both categories, like the moment when she'd touched his face with her small, able hands, or when she'd fallen asleep on his chest in the long grass and he'd felt her breathing, deep and content. Even the downright weird stuff; the ping-pong ball under the surface of his throat that bounced when he swallowed, the mysterious net of cords that wormed bizarrely across the backs of his hands when he moved his fingers. He hadn’t really been aware of just how used he was getting to it, for all its inconveniences and eccentricities, how used he’d been getting to being up here in the driving seat, the pilot of this clumsy ill-fitting hard-light skin. It was a pretty good body.
It almost felt like home.
He grinned, and he made it good and wide. If it was the last time, he wanted to make it count.
“That's- that's fine by me, Fox.” His voice might have been a little on the shaky side, small and quivery and not exactly the epitome of dauntless heroism he would have liked it to be, but at least it sounded sincere.
“Do it.”
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()~~~~~~~~ Chapter 14 - The Terrible Idea~~~~~~~~()