Continue Testing

“Don’t worry, I promise there won’t be any lasers at the bottom of this one,” it intoned in the dark, over the rush of wind and Little’s squeals of panic. “But I’ve decided it’s time to put the Cooperative Testing Initiative to some practical use.”

Blue could just glimpse their surroundings by the flickering light of their optics. The shaft they were falling down was a fairly narrow tube, just wide enough for both of them, with grubby cement sides and the occasional ledge that would definitely break her fingers if she tried to grab it at this speed. Once or twice she noticed yellowed writing that might have been large, blocky numbers, but she couldn’t focus long enough to make them out. Her eyes watered despite her glasses, and in the dim blue-green-yellow glow emitted by their third eyes, everything passed back into shadow too quickly.

“You know, I did something like this once, The Long Fall.” The Voice paused then, as if remembering or considering, then continued. “You’ve still got your boots on, haven’t you? You might not be going quite as far, but it would be such a waste if you shattered at the bottom.”

Below her, Blue could see Little tumbling down slightly faster- not a surprise if the small android indeed weighed more. She was in the process of considering whether she should try to tuck in her limbs and catch up, when she realized that Little was becoming easier and easier to see. Around them the shaft was filling with a faint and fuzzy lamp light, the amber glow tainting the rock in shades of brown and rust.

Just as quickly as it became visible, the narrow shaft was gone, opening into a wide chamber with a fast approaching floor. She saw Little hit it first with a crash, a yelp, and a cloud of gold dust, so Blue braced herself to follow suit. Just like they’d been warned, her boots took most of the fall, but even they didn’t stop the ache that jarred her from heel to knee.

“Ahh, owww-wow,” came Little's voice from behind her, and she turned. As the dust and shock of their landing started to clear, Blue realized Little hadn’t landed on her feet, nor had she managed to stand up yet. Stepping over to her companion and crouching down, she waved her hand through the mote-filled air and took only small breaths; every inhale felt like she was filling her lungs with very fine, very ancient sand.

“Little?” “Ow, sorry, ah—long fall, bad landing. Couldn’t fly, too dark, too narrow for wings and feathers...” Her yellow optic whirled and blinked, and when offered an arm, the smaller android pulled herself up on it.

“Is it broken?” When her pale-eyed friend only looked at her in confusion, Blue elaborated. “Your foot, your ankle? Can you walk?” “Walk, yes; walk the walk and talk the talk. The only thing about me.”

Little hopped in place, then held out her right foot, and Blue could see a dark crack running through her boot, a fissure in the white sheen that stretched all the way from heel to ankle. The design of her long fall boots was very different- much more contemporary- a delicate sort of fashion shoe rather than the spring-loaded sci-fi pieces on Blue's own feet. But fashion wasn’t often practical, and Little’s boots evidently hadn’t been made to survive what they’d just been through. But she could put weight on it and walk and didn’t seem to be in pain- although hadn’t she said ow?-, and a crack was certainly not the end of the world.

All things considered, they’d gotten off relatively unscathed from such a long distance free fall, and the Voice had been right. No lasers this time, but gratefulness seemed like a joke.

“Blue, Orange, please make your way to the doorway. I’m going to let you through into the Hydraulic Automation Piston Pressurising Sphere.”

 As promised, to their right a heavy round blast door groaned, dragging itself open with the reluctance of age and rust and disuse. Something hissed in the poorly lit space beyond, and Blue wrinkled her nose automatically in distaste, even as they moved together towards the gateway. Unfortunately, there was nowhere else to go, despite neither of them being entirely keen on compliance.

“Mind your step.”

They needed to.

Not only did the doorway open into a dark, damp, and foul-smelling room of unknown size and landscape, it also opened onto a narrow ledge only marginally wider than Blue’s footprint. Despite herself she cursed quietly, her injured arm darting out automatically in front of Little’s chest to stop the clumsier, hastier android from toppling straight over.

Squeaking, perhaps in fright or gratitude, the smaller girl wobbled unsteadily on her feet for a moment, before taking a few steps in the direction Blue had pointed her. Left, along the ledge.

The seawater light of Blue’s optical flashlight flickered on, and Little followed suit; which answered the question of whether she did or didn’t have that feature.  Together they turned the path an eerie, toxic green where their lights crossed, and something in the pit of Blue’s stomach turned slightly. She was glad, not for the first time, that food no longer seemed to be a part of her life.

Perhaps they’d lingered too long trying to negotiate a safe path along the edge, with Little sending her ping tool into the dark depths of the cavern in an effort to see what was below, but the Voice offered them guidance.

“It’s a good thing that this next test doesn’t have any sort of time limit. Otherwise you’d both have lost all those pretty Science Collaboration points you’d built up earlier. Still, we haven’t got all day. Make your way towards the Control Room.”

Without any real clue as to where the ‘Control Room’ might have been, they set off at a shuffle. It was slow going, one foot in front of the other as the pair made their way in single file along the ledge in the only direction presented to them: forwards.

As they edged through the dark in a slow but steady downwards incline, the rush of noise grew ever louder beneath and ahead of them. Like a huge machine- or several- grating and rolling and grinding amidst the bubbling sound of fluid that made Blue wonder if somewhere below, a pit of acid was waiting for them.  It would explain the stagnant smell and damp, cold touch to the air.

Eventually the path widened, and complicated. A blockage here, no ledge there; the necessity of portals across a jagged gap in order to continue, and drawn out muggy minutes spent shooting sparks into the darkness to try and find a surface that would hold the gateways. Even Little’s advanced eyesight seemed to be failing down here.

Under their feet the ground changed. Sometimes cement, sometimes smooth metal, chipped plaster or familiar open weave mesh grates that made Blue grit her teeth and wonder how they were ever going to reach the top again, now that they’d fallen so deep.

It was on one such flooring that Blue’s boot pushed straight through. A rusted patch, perhaps, that Little must have missed. The taller android’s weight was enough to cause the ancient metal fibres to simply dissolve around her feet, and with a yell of surprise and shock, Blue fell forwards.

The hole immediately consumed the lower half of her body, and her companion running back to her made the ground shake and tremble worryingly. Was the gap around her hips growing? Were flakes of the floor giving in to pressure and age?

Her portal device had been knocked half ajar from her arm in the fall, and pulling her right hand out the rest of the way, she grappled desperately for a hold on the mesh, digging her fingers into the small honeycomb spaces between the grids to stop herself sliding any further.

Blue kicked, scrabbling with her feet for purchase in the empty air, without any clue as to what could be down there. Maybe another level, just a few metres below, and it would be safe to drop? Or, more likely, nothing and nothing and nothing and nothing before another painful crash, and her ankles didn’t feel up to that again.

She made a noise that seemed too loud in the dark; a frustrated, anguished exclamation that tightened in her throat and made her eyes water. Damn it all. A sharp movement through the alarm was Little kneeling in front of her, clearly panicked, chattering in fearful unfocused sentences.

 “Little, you’re too heavy, it isn’t safe. Get back.” If the other android did really weigh more because of all her artificial parts, the entire fragile gangway could cave in underneath them both. To her surprise, the smaller girl actually drew back ever so slightly, but a frown passed over her face as she went.

The portals Blue had placed, glowing aquamarine and violet and casting a pulsating light on the whole scene, still marked the way forwards. Perhaps her friend could carry on without her. Perhaps there was a ledge underneath, perhaps if she just dropped-

She slipped slightly and cried out again, immediately displeased at herself for doing so, and continued to swing her legs in the tangle of her coat. The sharp, wiry edges of the walkway pierced her shirt and scraped her optic, making the deep blue eye shut in panic and pain.

Little crawled towards her again, and the plank creaked and groaned in complaint. Perhaps this was what the Voice had intended after all, to lead them down here into an elaborate death trap. Surely the lasers would have been easier.

“Little, it’s dangerous. You have to get back. You have to keep going.” Even to her own ears it sounded unconvincing, and when she looked up, her companion was still there, even as the broken walkway tilted at an awfully disconcerting angle.

“Blue and Little. Togetherness and friends.” Came the surprisingly steady answer.

She tried not to complain or make a noise when Little abruptly grabbed her wounded arm, hard gloved fingers wrapping precisely around the makeshift scarf bandage at her elbow. Fear lessened the pain, at least, and Blue kicked the air again as another dangerous groan came from the creaking, bending metal.

With her hands forming a symmetrical- and surprisingly solid- grip on both of Blue’s elbows, Little drew back on her heels. Low to the floor, her glasses clouded with dust, Blue watched the mesh indent under the pressure of Little’s cracked boot and felt a lick of fear. Then, just as quickly as she'd fallen, she was out.

They staggered and sprawled, crawling and squirming from the edge as it sunk further still, flaking rust falling away into the dark, as Blue made a final desperate kick to safety.

It had been a fairly obvious trap, but there’d been nothing for it, so they’d just forged ahead and walked straight in. The chamber was new, but not unfamiliar: the white posts of several red-topped switches, overhead vents ready to deposit any variety of cubes, and a dizzying array of light blue dots crowded overhead and swirling everywhere.

She almost threw her portal device at the gridded ground in fury and frustration.

But Blue wasn’t one for great displays of anything, so her spine went taut and her dry scream died silent in her throat. Her tense silence spoke volumes anyway.

“Well, well, Blue and Orange. How lovely you’ve decided to join us again.”

Little- startled and shaking- made a move like a frightened child, ducking around and hiding behind her taller friend without an ounce of courage to her name. Blue would have shared her fear, but every part of her was already filled with bitter rage and angry disappointment.

“I hope you two had a fun little adventure. While you were gone, I’ve been busy preparing some new testing courses for you. You know, as you tried to abandon me. And here’s me, thinking only about how best to entertain you.”

Aiming her device without sound or flinch, Blue fired a wisp of bright aquamarine at the wall, not even sparing a glance to the red-eyed camera that fell from the ceiling to the ground a few feet to her left. A tinny, pre-recorded message- Vital Testing Apparatus Destroyed- accompanied the thunk of the camera hitting the floor, but was drowned out by a louder, over-emphasized sigh that came from everywhere and nowhere about the room at once.

“Was that entirely necessary? These things don’t just repair themselves, you know, and I’m still cleaning up the mess from your fall back down here. I had to push twenty-seven entire chambers aside to make room for that shaft.”

Blue opened her portals above and below the camera, ignoring the gadget as it began a high speed fall through repeated space. The sigh came again, slower this time, and- if either of the androids had recognized it- wearing thin on patience.

“If you must behave like a child, Blue, I’ll have no choice but to treat you as one.”

Behind her, Little pushed forward abruptly, and the pair of them stumbled, Blue giving an undignified yelp of surprise. Staggering to regain her balance, she turned to question her small companion, only to find Little poised defensively between her and an open gash in the wall; a wound where several panels had fallen forward and revealed the mechanisms within.

With her portal gun already raised, the short, excitable-come-terrified android fired a volley of multi-coloured blasts from her device at a pair of reaching metal arms that had sprung forth from the opened wall panels. Sparks of red and gold bounced harmlessly off the dark steel and hissing pivot points, and they stretched undeterred towards their quarry, even as Little’s aim became increasingly haphazard in anxiety.

She’d made a fairly valiant attempt, and Blue felt a bubbling feeling of gratitude in her lungs that was entirely distracting, given their situation. There’d be time for sentimentality later, after they’d escaped alive.

Stepping forward in her own turn, the taller of the two androids turned her device on its side and hammered it against the sharp point of the nearest mechanical limb. The crane spun from the force, twisting at an odd angle and backing up a few paces. The next arm, receiving a similar assault, bent sideways and drooped before connecting with the floor and dragging to a whimpering stop.

Without waiting for instruction, Little, who was jumping up and down with squeaks of varying distress and volume, grabbed Blue’s free hand and tugged. The force elicited a hiss of pain from the taller android, as her wounded arm was pulled abruptly straight, even as her legs tumbled to follow.

At first the urgency seemed a fool’s errand, because they had nowhere to go with all this stumbling speed.  Blue was about to voice as much, when she realized that her short companion was tugging her fast towards the chamber exit. For no visible reason, the doorway decal had blinked over to a glowing yellow tick- as if rewarding them for completing a puzzle they hadn’t even started- and the round panel yawned wide.

She didn’t like it at all.

Behind them, the pair of arms had recovered from Blue’s attack- although the one on the left squeaked metallically as it stretched- and most worryingly, they were no longer alone. An entire centipede of the mechanical limbs had begun to squirm and roil behind the gap in the wall, scratching and squabbling with each other in order to break out and grab either or both of the androids.

The space beyond the door was dark and hard to see, but even in the half light it seemed vaguely familiar. A murky stairwell, perhaps a distant elevator at the far end, calling them to safety; it would make for an easy escape from the whirring, clunking arms.

It was, without question, a trap.

“Wait, Little-“

Perhaps Little was remembering the armed arms- ha ha- that had attacked them from out of the glass cylinder that one time, long ago. Or perhaps it was some other bad experience sticking in her mind from their time separated from each other, and Blue would never know.

Either way, she struggled like a someone possessed, blind and deaf and straining towards that easy exit. Whatever questions Blue may have had about her small companion’s strength were dashed as Little pulled her effortlessly into the doorway despite the taller android quite literally digging her heels in.

“Little, wait-wait-!”

The small, yellow eye of her optic whirled frantically, spraying golden sparks visible even from behind in the dark. There would be no reasoning with her. Whatever fear had gripped her was undeniable, pre-programmed into the deepest parts of her oldest code.

Little staggered, dragging herself and her partner through the doorway and onto the familiar metal steps without hesitation. If she suspected a trap, she took it eagerly in preference of the room above.

As they clunked downwards, she turned around mid-step, facing her taller companion without letting go. Blue could see the irrational panic in all three of her eyes and knew; Little couldn’t have heeded her warnings even if she’d wanted to.

“Wait, stop. Little. Stop.”

Finally they slowed, Little’s body freezing up at the command, and Blue was able to pull backwards against the shorter girl’s grip. Pain bit into her elbow and jarred her fingers, but they stopped and stood still at last. Or, mostly still in Little’s case, as the fidgety android wrung her palms together and shook from her nose to her knees in fright and confusion.

“Little, it’s okay.” Lifting her portal device and turning it carefully, Blue rubbed the crook of her injured arm with her slightly exposed wrist. It didn’t really help, but she could pretend that it did, and that was close enough. “We need to go back. Maybe we can get through the gap in the wall.“

That would have required going past the attack arms, but she was prepared to work hard on convincing her paranoid companion that it was the only way out.

Blue didn’t even get the chance.

No sooner had she looked down did she realize that they were standing on a large, round floor panel that had never been in the Chamberlock before.  Then, faster than blinking, the whole thing withdrew from beneath their feet like the shutter of a camera. The floor was simply gone, and the lightless musty air of the empty shaft below rushed up to greet them.

With a pounding headache and a stabbing pain in her wounded left elbow, she opened her eyes and squinted. Everything around her was uncomfortably bright; so instead she focused through her third eye, the cybernetic optic opening lethargically with a sliver of brightest blue.

Her vision had never been anywhere near as good through her central optic; and considering how heavily she leaned on her glasses, that was really saying something. Then again, one didn’t normally look out of one’s stomach, and she didn’t want to think about what sort of fabricated sinews and nerves might have been necessary in order to make the whole contraption work.

Through a sheen of pale static, Blue realized the searing brightness was coming from the lasers that criss-crossed a foot or so overhead. The more she focused, the more she became aware of their heat radiating down to where she lay, and she wondered idly how she’d survived passing through them.

Far above she could see the speck of light that was the distant glass ceiling they had both fallen through, Little with a cry of alarm as-

Her eyes snapped open despite the brightness, and Blue rolled onto her side, searching nearby for any sign of her small companion. An arm’s length away she saw some tattered pieces of burnt yellow fabric- frill- and bit down on an irrational panic that shot up from her gut and straight into her throat.

“Blue!”

Twisting her neck towards the sound, she looked upwards through a red mesh of lasers to see Little perched on a shallow ledge, and wondered if she was hallucinating or concussed from the fall.

“Awake now?”

The panic and doubt fell away in a flurry of desperate emotions when Little smiled eagerly and waved enthusiastically, fidgeting in her crouch but seeming very real, and safe. Relieved beyond belief, Blue slackened against the floor and grinned up at her friend, waving back weakly from the wrist.

“Good!”

Before she could even get out the question that was beginning to burn its way to the forefront of her mind- of how Little managed to get up there at all- the yellow-eyed android aimed a glowing portal device straight at her.

“Little, wait-“

The ground disappeared underneath her, and Blue felt momentarily weightless, watching in resigned alarm as the criss-crossing lasers receded above her. She expected to hit the floor backwards in landing- an imminent and familiar dull thud- but instead there was a commotion, a grabbing touch, a squeak, and a grip that slowed her fall.

In shock, she realized Little had caught her, or tried to. Despite her small size, the miniature android had opened the portal gateway above herself and dutifully made to catch her friend,  very nearly succeeded.

As Blue picked herself up from the floor, untangling from her companion and helping her to her feet, she briefly considered that her sunny-eyed partner might have been stronger than she’d previously given her credit for. Something to do with metal limbs and artificial muscles, no doubt, and not measured at all by her height.

“Blue, you okay? Safe flight?”

Nodding, Blue touched her friend’s fidgeting shoulder to try and calm her before finally looking around. Little had portalled them up to a narrow ledge that skirted the room, a few feet above the grid of deadly lasers. It was clear she had only made the landing- placing her in a position to see the ledge at all- through sheer luck.

“Blue, you wouldn’t get up so- so- let you sleeping, recharge sleep.”

After the glass shattered, they must have both fallen down through the lasers- a few scorch marks burned into their clothes confirmed the thought. Little had a charred and sizeable tear in her skirt - and there didn’t appear to be any quick way back up the shaft they’d toppled down.

“Good?”

Struggling not to let her frustration out lest it affect her friend’s enthusiasm, Blue nodded again.

Their situation was anything but good.

They had been so painfully, achingly close to escape. And then that stupid pane of fragile glass. Little must have- on top of being unexpectedly strong- also weighed more than she’d first guessed, perhaps something to do with the mechanics of an entirely artificial android body. It probably took a lot of gears to keep her going.

They’d been so close, and now they were almost back to square one, starting again, having to make the long, arduous climb up to those cracked panels and twisting vines all over from scratch. Over and over and over. The circumstances were enough to take the gusto out of anyone, and Blue was fighting hard not to let them deflate her altogether.

With a sigh, she turned towards a larger nook across the sea of lasers- solving the equation without any real conscious effort- and made to lead them both through a portal and into a narrow hallway along safer ground.

Little paused, and Blue turned to face her in confusion.

“The...” She rubbed her gloved fingers over the dimpled shell of her recently pristine portal device. “The top—higher, escape, and the floor window. We fell like sheets; birds and glass feathers.”

Blue frowned at the sentences her companion supplied, even more nonsensical than usual, and reached out carefully to shake her by the arm. Little’s vocal processor made a skip, not unlike a hiccup, and then spoke in a different voice; quiet, careful, moderated and clear.

“Thank you.” It was Blue’s voice echoed back to her out of the smaller android’s recording feature, startling at first, sounding sterner than it ever did in her own head. “You left the tests to come here- you left the- you came back. Thank you.“

Blue remembered the phrases; she’d thanked Little for rescuing her during the ambush, when the excitable girl had given up on testing in favour of friendship.

So perhaps Little had noticed, or worse- understood- her brief, anguished moment of internal debate after all, parroting the exact same sentiment that Blue had once done. Even if this time, the words didn't entirely fit..

“Friends,” Blue supplied, a single word explanation, and watched as her partner visibly relaxed before turning back around to face the thin hallway presented to them.

They had been running for days. Clearly measurable days. Four of them, in fact.

She could tell, because instead of the persistent hum of fluorescent lighting that never ended and made every hour muddle by confusingly into the next, the rolling sun lit their new route. And it had set three times over the flat, distant horizon, making way for an array of stars and the pale moon overhead.  Then after the dark; it had returned, bearing down and scorching. Three times. Four days in the empty, scalding, parched desert.

But God, it was good. The endless sand, the sunburn, the biting ants; it was good, so good, because it meant one thing. They were out.

Finally free of the accursed facility.

Sure, outlook of the outside world hadn’t been green fields and open arms, but anything was better than endless testing and containment so they had embraced it with enthusiasm, and as much speed as possible.

Four days ago they’d finally broken out. And they’d been running ever since, to put as much ground between them and Aperture as possible; one could never be entirely sure how far under the ground the laboratories stretched, so the more distance the better.

They had stopped only when exhaustion buckled Blue’s knees and brought her to the ground, sinking into the sand and shielding her face from light or bugs or heat, falling immediately into anxious but unashamed sleep in the wide open space. Little by her side would sit, a quiet, tireless protector, somehow containing the constantly moving energy, the boundless tempo of her excitement and terror all rolled into the twitch in her leg and the persistent tap of her fingers on the portal device.

Then they’d set off again, two androids- not human and not quite robot- making their way across the vast desert. Despite all the difficulties they’d faced together in Aperture, one blessing was that neither of them needed food nor drink to carry on. Little didn’t even need to breathe or sleep, and for the good of their progress, Blue did the latter as sparingly as possible. She ran on adrenaline and sheer brutal will-power.

At one point, after they’d lost their footing and slid down a particularly tall sand-dune, Little had ground to a stop with an awful, grating noise and a moan of pain. Sand in her joints. Blue helped her to shake her legs, arms, hands, wrists; grains falling from the thin seams of her, and they carried on. Progress was a little slower after that, and Little whimpered to a halt every so often to shake her limbs and wail; but inevitably followed her partner on and on, full of faith and grit and an unpleasant squeak like she needed oiling.

This environment wasn’t truly good for either of them, and things were starting to look bleak.

Blue had almost given up hope of finding anyone or anything alive- or near enough to it- outside of Aperture Laboratories, when Little pointed into the hazy distance. Reseating her glasses and squinting, Blue stared hard, but couldn’t see anything except heat and sand. “It’s a tall pointy thing”, Little had explained, “Tall, big, pointy sharp—like a beak, but up!- and with holes, and there’s a blinking light.”

It wasn’t much of a description, though Blue almost recoiled from the latter part. Blinking light? Her brain faltered.

Technology. Aperture. The little orange-to-green lights that flickered on the blast doors.

No. No. No. No nononono-

But not all technology was a sign of Science, she knew from her life memories. With any luck, it would simply mean civilization; a conversation not held in thirty-percent bird song and some way to clean out her small friend before Little corroded and seized up for good in the dust.

Eventually, Blue could see the tower too, some sort of reception or radio tower. By that time, Little was describing buildings still concealed by haze; a huge high wall, a road that twisted around on itself cannibalistically- literally, if her clumsy description were to be believed, the road was actually eating itself. Blue reserved judgment until she could see the thing herself and explain it in a more reasonable manner.

Then again, as they reached it, and ran along the side of the road instead of on the crumbling tarmac… yes, Blue conceded, it did in fact appear to be eating itself. It even paused as they skirted it, and then continued its self cannibalism as they carried on their unmarked path towards the now visible desert town.

Blue and Little had come from Aperture’s perpetual testing initiative. They had flown and fallen incomprehensible distances while still assuredly contained inside an immense underground laboratory, they had bent the rules of quantum space to their own will with a single specialized shot, and inevitably they had fought and escaped the clutches of a psychotic, malicious Artificial Intelligence obsessed with science and murder.

They’d become adjusted to weird. But after what felt a life time of isolation, there was still something they were completely unaccustomed to.

“Hey!”

The androids stopped in their tracks, and Little yelped in total fear; she’d never seen another human being before, especially not one without a central optic. A man was waving at them not too far ahead, having appeared beside a small shack that they’d previously taken for granted and assumed, from experience with Aperture offices and buildings, to be abandoned.

“Hey, watch it; you’re stepping on my corn!”

Little hopped on the spot anxiously, and Blue glanced at the empty sand at her feet, trying to decide if the situation was safe or if they should turn tail and get out of there. She decided not to point out that there was no sign of any corn what so ever.

Instead, guiding her nervous little friend forward with her good hand behind her back, Blue lead them towards the figure. Whoever he was, ally or enemy, he was their first human contact in an immeasurable amount of time. None the less, Little balanced her portal device nervously; they’d already discovered the devices were mostly useless out here without any suitable surfaces. But old habits die hard.

“Who are you?” He asked them, not unfriendly, but definitely suspicious. They didn’t answer, in a state beyond shocked, and he looked behind them to the distant horizon, across the vast unending desert that disappeared as far as the eye could see in every direction. “Did you come across the desert? On foot? Hey, that’s cool. I’m John Peters. You know, the farmer?” He gestured at his chest with the announcement of his name.

“Little!” Blue startled as her companion found her voice suddenly, chirping up and pointing to herself eagerly from the side of her taller friend. She knew this game. Then she pointed at Blue, who glanced between her and the man, the farmer, third eye narrowed slightly. “And Blue! Little and Blue. Blue and Little. Friends!”

Friends, as if it were a title comparable to farmer. Blue laughed quietly in genuine- slightly delirious- good humor. Little certainly seemed to make an occupation of it.

“Blue and Little. Alright, nice to meet you. Come this way, come on.”

Without waiting to make sure they were following, John Peters walked back towards the small shanty shack he’d appeared beside. As they followed cautiously after him, rounding the rickety building, Little announced quietly to Blue- unwittingly discovering the act of loudly whispering- that she could see other buildings not too far off, describing what she could see. A footpath, no catwalks, houses, a road that wasn’t eating itself, windows in buildings, a billboard or two, a helicopter swooping discretely overhead and occasionally ducking back behind a particularly thick cloud. The blinking light on top of the tower was much closer.

Peters entered the shack, making his way to a far corner, and they paused in the doorway, ready to make a break for it if they needed to. They had honed survival skills that hinged on speedy escapes.

On a flat table set without chairs in the centre of the single room, a blocky silver radio played a non-descript song, and Blue tensed in memory. But once the panic subsided, she realized she didn’t recognize the tune at all- and the broadcast was clear, without static or skipping- quite unlike what she’d encountered in Aperture. 

A small click was Peters hanging up a phone-call they hadn’t realized he was on, and he turned to look first at them, and then at the radio as the song wound up and ended. A male voice came over the speaker, so unlike the disembodied Voice that they were used to that Blue felt her remaining organic insides twist unpleasantly.

“Welcome back, dear listeners. I hope you enjoyed the weather. Now, this just in, I’ve just gotten off the phone with John Peters, you know, the farmer? And you won’t believe what he told me. No really, you could guess, but I bet you wouldn’t.

Well, he said that he was just out tending the imaginary corn crop towards the Northern edge of the desert, when he met someone. Two someones. New someones! I told you you wouldn’t believe it, didn’t I? These newcomers, according to John Peters- you know, the farmer- apparently just walked straight into the outskirts of our little community. Straight across the corn, too- shame on you, newcomers- but I know I for one am impressed at anyone who can walk across the vast, endless, infinite desert that separates us from the rest of the world, and time, and space, and void.”

Blue jerked, and grabbed Little’s upper arm with such force and shock that her small friend turned and looked up at her in confused surprise. Although it mightn’t have twigged for Little, Blue had sure enough realized that the man on the radio was speaking about them.

Had Peters reported them to the authorities? Should they run? Where would they even run to? And what if Little had another stall? What if the sand in her joints caused her to break down for good and Blue couldn’t get her going again?

What if these people returned them to Aperture?

Her beating heart stopped, and she stared in sudden, blank fear at the farmer, and the radio.

“Now,” the broadcaster continued cheerily regardless, “It’s been quite a long time since we’ve had new guests. Over a year and a half in fact, since we had our last newcomer. You all know who I’m talking about!” There was a light, almost giggle in his voice. “And according to Peters, on the phone, he told me that our two visitors have large, glowing eyes in their stomachs. So I think, wow! They can’t be all bad. I think we should open them wide with welcome arms- ha-ha! I mean welcome them with wide open arms, of course!”

While the farmer watched the radio, Blue started stepping towards the sandy half-path outside, gently pushing Little behind her.

“To do just that, I contacted the person who I think is the most suitable and capable for such a job. Not only is he our most recent newcomer, but he’s also a scientist! So of course, if there’s anything weird about them- although we can rule out only having two eyes at least- he’ll know all about it. Or at least be able to figure it out. So, stay tuned listeners, and stay right where you are new visitors! Perfect Carlos will be there soon to greet you. Oh, and of course-

How things had managed to go downhill so fast was, while not a mystery, a case of very poor luck. Blue’s concept of time had been gradually starting to come back to her, just like the concept of sleep had done, so she knew it had only been about half an hour ago that things seemed pretty good.

Alternating between leading and leaning on Little, she had found a way out from the ambush chamber and into a series of derelict offices. Shattered glass littered the floor and crunched underneath every step they took. Computers, desks, chairs and coffee mugs filthy with mold were overturned and scattered about the area. Silent, long dead hard-drives spewed wiring and parts on a floor that might have at some point been carpeted, but now resembled soggy detritus.

Then they’d encountered something Little had never seen before, and Blue had never managed to reach through the frosted glass of the testing chambers. At her small companion's question, Blue had explained that the thing—with its stumpy leaves and thick bulbous trunk—was a tree.

Although her pre-programmed blueprints and archives lacked any specific articles on trees, Little had still made a jump of acknowledgement, drawing a connection; her databases told her that birds liked trees, and that often they would nest in them.

Blue had spent the next ten minutes grappling with her companion one-armed to try and stop her from climbing up the slimy plant and settling in for the night like the bird she still thought she was. Thankfully Little’s excited efforts lessened with each consecutive tree they encountered, although she still looked at the upper branches longingly as they passed.

Then at a jog- they’d started jogging and not really stopped, because walking was too slow and running was too tiring but time was of the essence- they’d ascended a ramp and halted in shock.

Light filled the area and washed over them both, a rich beautiful golden light, glinting off hazardous bare scaffolding and the huge, fresh green leaves of a network of actual healthy looking vines. Motes of dust shimmered in the rays that filtered down through the open panels in the roof tiling, and Blue’s heart lifted almost to the ceiling as she walked a few steps over and stared straight up to it. It was impossible to see out; the natural light was blinding, even at a distance, but the air was fresher, clearer, warmer-- open. It carried the scent of grass and rain and soil and absolutely no trace of the metallic smell of electricity, and she knew without doubt that they were so near the surface; hell, she could literally taste it.

The newness of the area had shaken them both, and Little was at her side offering support already, the smaller android an increasingly common mixture of interest, excitement and anxiety. They picked their way with great care around gaping holes in the floor, across panes of glass ceiling, along bare iron supports, and between overhanging vines that stuck wetly to their faces.

All the while Blue kept her gaze flicking upwards; almost certain that her eyes were starting to adjust, and that the glare was starting to take on the blueish tint of the open sky, and every now and then her hair would lift slightly in the warmth—the warmth!! She had all but forgotten the feeling of summer- from a breeze weaving its way through the uneven roof panels. Any minute now, they were going to find a way through, maybe a vine that would hold their weight, or there’d be a beam that they could move to construct a make-shift ramp, something, anything, and they could climb out together into that open air, into the sun—

A shriek and a crack broke her wishful thinking and Blue whirled around. Her heart sunk to the bottom of her long fall boots.

Little stood a few paces back, keeping a steady distance as they’d navigated one at a time across all the types of perilously unstable floor. In this case it had been a pane of fractured, crystallized glass. The yellow eyed girl had stopped perfectly and unnaturally still, large cracks spreading from her feet like spider webs through thin ice. A quiet, clicking snap was coming from the glass as it strained under her weight and the cracks deepened into fissures with every passing moment.

From the centre of it, Little watched helplessly, eyes fixed on her companion in a silent plea for rescue, and Blue found herself just staring. First at her friend, frozen in place and knowing that any movement would cause the glass to give way entirely, and second, back ahead, towards their path to escape.

They were so close.

It would be so easy.

She was bare minutes away from finding a way out through those open panels. She could feel the warmth of the sun and the hum of fresh air filled with summer bugs, just a few more steps and she could get out there and be free at last.

In memory of Orange and the twice taken escape route. In memory of all the broken hollow cores and the pink eyed one she’d accidentally taken through the emancipation grill. In memory of Little who wasn’t even human anyway, she wasn’t even technically alive.

Did she even truly want to be outside the facility? What would even happen to a corrupt, glitchy little bird obsessed android in the outside world? She mightn’t even survive, depending on how she was powered.

Maybe it would be for the best to leave her here so she could test, sate the Itch, keep the Voice busy, forward the cause of science, leave Blue free to escape and live her life, everybody would be happy--

“B-Blue...”

Turning back around, Blue tried to steel herself to say goodbye, as she’d done in the silence of that hallway after the Victory Lift; darting through the broken chamber and leaving Little to deal with the Itch and take the excursion funnel back to testing on her own.

Standing now on the creaking and groaning glass instead of a button, Little trembled violently from head to toe. Either she was afraid of falling through when her unstable floor broke, or somehow she could see right into her companion’s thoughts, and was frightened by what they could mean. Her expression was an open book; the wide eyes searched both her surroundings and her friend desperately.

“Blue, Blue, how—how—hhhhhow with the right conditions the fish hawk can see prey underwater from a distance of nearly fffff-ffff-friends?” She squeezed the last word out with an air of desperation through the persistent glitching of her processor. When Blue didn’t answer, she added three more. “Escape together? How?”

Every passing instant the fissures in the glass grew, cracking and splitting further and deeper; it was only going to be a few seconds before it caved in completely and Little tumbled down into whatever room or cavern lay below. And Blue knew, she could just let her go.

She could convince herself that the small, timid little android would be okay, that with her over-keen eyesight she’d find her own way out in time; or that getting out wasn’t even technically best for her. Better for Little to stay here, in the safety of the facility.

In that moment, Blue tried very hard to convince herself she could be that person.

That she had been integrated, that she could look past compassion and morals and sympathy and use cold robotic logic to pick the conclusion that would see her take the last few steps to long sought freedom. It wasn’t her fault she’d been made into this thing, that her humanity had been taken away, that she no longer needed empathy or companions; that Little would be just another victim of science, like Orange, falling by the wayside to blunt determination and her own goals. Her programmed need to survive.

Survival of the fittest rose in the back of her throat like bile, and Blue turned to look around these upper levels again; the vines, the over corroded supports rusted by the elements, the warmth of sunlight filtering in through the gaps in the panels above. There was nothing with which she could help Little, even if she wanted to.

Another crunch came from the glass, and the place where Little’s boots were frozen sunk slightly, the shards starting to warp downwards from gravity as their support on each other gave way. In the centre of it, Little- she was a robot, she’d never been human, just a robot, only a robot—looked more alive and more frightened and more desperate than most humans Blue had ever known.

And she realized that humanity wasn’t measured by what your body was made out of, but... something else. There wasn’t time for poetry.

More than escape, she needed to hold onto the burning in her throat, the pain in her gut, the sweat on her cheek, the living individual in her that had been buffeted and modified and drawn so thin but never worn out, and as the glass gave a final creak and an almighty shatter, Blue threw the only lifeline that she had, and flung herself for the edge, for her partner.

Swinging her device, it hummed as she activated its short range gravity field, enough to catch on to the core that Little still held tight, enough to drag them together, but not enough to stop the fall.

All three of them crashed through the ceiling, glass shards longer that Blue’s arm falling and shattering around them, slicing through the air next to her face as she prayed for a single stroke of luck to keep them from cutting her open.

The room below was a yawning drop; it hadn’t been, but panels were moving aside with great speed and even without any verbal greeting, Blue knew that the Voice was back in control.

They were falling in a line; Little feet first and blind to what was below, staring up at her friend and wondering at her various expressions, but too grateful for her companionship to focus on much else. No matter what was coming or would greet them at the end of the drop, Little didn’t mind, so long as she was not alone.

Blue, on the other hand, was beginning to feel more distressed by the second. The only thing feasibly worse than falling a great distance was the landing at the end; she knew it would be too much to ask for to hope for something soft to crash into. But as they fell towards the end of the shaft- for the walls were adjusting and moving and shaping in around them exactly like one- she could see a red light illuminating Little from behind.

She couldn't hear anything over the rush of air as they fell,, but she knew from experience that if she could there’d be a melodic hum, and eventually, the smell of electrical heat. A burning, charred scent from the glowing beams of red hot energy that criss-crossed below them, getting closer every second as they approached their landing destination, the room below.

Maybe not perfectly, because she had bled quite a lot all over the already grubby floor, and Little sparked and twitched and blurted out random facts about birds with increasing volume while recounting her own frightening experiences. Her small hands would clasp over her mouth each time, as if she were shocked or embarrassed by her misbehaving vocal processor.

The taller of the two androids was most surprised to hear that Little did seem to have some form of sleep mode after all, as- interspersed with feathered facts- the short girl told all about the ‘voices she heard with her eyes closed’ while in her critically low energy state. Little was fairly confounded by it all, but Blue understood batteries a little better, and bit her own lip, shuddering for how close she truly had come to never seeing the tiny, enthusiastic android ever again.

It did leave the mystery now of what exactly it was that Little had ‘dreamt’ of. Was it just some glitch caused by her system, something programmed in by the Voice, or something else entirely? If it were a memory, then the only feasible answer was that it had occurred before they met. But how long before? How much existed before then for either of them? Blue had started asking herself hard questions rather than pushing them aside, but despite her resolve to live in less outright denial, many answers still eluded her.

Still, there would be time for reminiscing later.

Bandaged and shaky, but feeling better for companionship, Blue was able to get to her feet and look around. Now that the chamber was safe and all the turrets had been removed by Little’s quick aim, they could navigate around it for an exit.

“Little. Listen.” Her friend’s face turned back to her, open and wide eyed, curious and keen. “I’m truly sorry for leaving you.” The small android smiled and nodded, as if it were nothing, but Blue reached out to touch her shoulder, because it wasn’t.

“I should have asked if you wanted to escape too. I assumed one thing, then another. That was wrong of me.” The golden yellow optic in Little’s stomach had raised its lower shutter in a smile, just like her facial expression, and dimly Blue wondered, which one came first? Which one controlled the other?

Taking a few steps, the taller android led her small comrade towards the area where she guessed she’d first entered the room; having been reminded of the hollow core, she was keen that at least one of them be armed with something more than the passive quantum tunnelling devices.

“Little, what do you want to do?”

With an electric twitch, the smile left her first eye to make way for mild confusion, and her freckled face wore a frown. Blue tried again.

“I want to escape the facility. To get outside. Do you understand?”

A momentary pause, before Little nodded. “Yes. Blue wants to leave the Aperture Science Enrichment Facility. No—nn-no other bird is known to go to such lengths to nnn-n-nnno  more testing.”

“That’s right, no more testing. I want to get outside, and be free.” She waited for her friend to nod in confirmation of understanding- whether she truly did or not- before continuing. “So, I want to escape. Do you want to escape? Do you want to come with me and leave together? Or do you want to stay? What do you want?”

This time the smile reached all three of her eyes, and Little gestured at Blue broadly and excitedly, and the taller android had to jerk to the side slightly so as to avoid a painful bump to her wounded elbow.

“Together! Together, yes-yes! Friends! I want friends.” “You want—“ “Blue and Little! Friends. Yes.” “But you understand that I want to escape?” “Yes. Fledge from Facility. T-T-T-Time to migrate.” “What about the Itch?”

It couldn’t have been more apparent that Little had no idea what that meant, even if she felt the Itch burning and stinging through her wiring at that very moment. Testing had been wonderful, without doubt, but togetherness was better, and the two euphoria were incomparable. She made a gesture with her small gloved hand, something generically dismissive- and Blue again pondered her miraculous understanding for human body language.

“Little, outside the Facility everything is very different. There won’t be any tests. Do you understand?” “No more testing. Painful but okay.” “Painful?” Blue hadn’t considered that the Itch could be more harmful than an irritant, but staying in the facility wasn’t a long term option for her anymore, so she continued. “If we escape, can you cope without testing, or is it too painful? Outside there’s no tests, no more Hub, no more portals, no more Voice.”

“No more Voice. But I can stay with you? With Blue? Blue and Little?” “Yes, Blue and Little.” “No more testing. Togetherness and—and not ever testing is okay.” The small android gestured between them both- herself and her blue eyed, quiet companion, who had spoken more in the past few minutes than she had ever done before, and said with finality- “Friends.”

Blue would have asked more about the Itch, or what Little felt when she wasn’t testing, but her partner in science made an odd excited jump and a few sparks shimmied out of her spinning optic plate as she let out a cry.

“Friends!”

Confused, the taller of the pair puzzled over the fact that Little hadn’t pointed at her with that last outburst, but instead sprinted ahead a few steps. The core had rolled onto its side where Blue had dropped it earlier after being shot, and now the sunny eyed little android dropped to her knees beside it.

She looked both amazed and excited, and reached out for the hollow metal sphere, rolling it over. By the time she turned it to face her, her hands had snapped back as though she’d been burnt and her face was a picture of horror and confusion.

“Friends.... friend... friend?”

Stepping up beside them and squatting with an exhausted huff, Blue watched in silent curiosity. Little was looking up at her expectantly, her attentions darting back and forth between girl and core, as if waiting for her taller friend to somehow provide an answer to a question that hadn’t been worded. And Blue had no idea.

Little touched the core gently; her fingers roamed haphazardly over the handles, the empty metal shell, the edge of the casing where the optic should have been- especially where the optic should have been- with clear distress. Finally she stopped, shifting her weight backwards so that she sat heavily on the ground, her knees at odd angles and her eyes turned to Blue in pitiful anxious confusion, seeking answers, direction, help from her companion who always seemed to have a plan.

“Friend, a friend. Aperture Science Personality Construct- Sphere- Core- Core- Corrrrrrrrrrrrrrella’s are a subgenus of cockatoo common in Australia and New Zealand, they are rrreeellllll----eee-allll-al-al-ality cores.” Her grip curled around the handle of the hollow metal object that Blue had intended to use for a weapon, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps flinging the empty spheres into harm’s way to protect herself hadn’t been entirely considerate.

Seeing Little’s expression- as if she’d found and lost something all at once- Blue knew her own actions had been disrespectful in some way she’d not really indulged in thinking about. Because that would have required acknowledging that all the spheres, empty and hollow and still in that cold room, were once in a state of consciousness that could have received respect; that they’d once been bright and chattering like the few she’d seen alive; that it hadn’t been just a room, but a graveyard.

Slowly and carefully, Blue reached out to touch the empty core as well, and turned it away, and then around, to show it to Little from all angles while the smaller android stared intently with all her eyes. Her fingers scraped at the plated metal edge of her central optic, the warm yellow aperture tiny with anguish and confusion.

“Do... you know this core specifically?” Blue couldn’t have told it apart from all the other hollow cores she’d seen, not without the brightly coloured ‘eye’ that differed between each one, but perhaps Little was different.

“No...” Ah. Maybe not. “Aperture Science Artificial Personalities.... I-I don’t know, don’t remember, can’t tell, no. But friends, all friends. The same.” “The same as what? Each other?” “The same as each other. The same as Little.”

Blue faltered as her brain worked overtime with both its robotic integrations and its remaining organic parts.

“Artificial Personality?” “Aperture Science Artificial Personality Construct. Sphere. Cores. Intelligence. Curiosity. Adventure. Cake. Cake. Space. Anxiety. Birds, Conscience, C-C-C-C-Consideration. Morality, Sandwich, Facts and Figures and Life Insurance, A-A-Aaaaaa-“ She crowed violently, dissolving into a series of bird calls and stiffly jerking limbs.

When her fit finally stopped and the twitching eased with a mist of sparks, Little slumped in transparent resignation. Blue’s mental processes were also slowing down; having come to what she felt was a fairly solid conclusion.

Her own personality was a process of growing up, her human life spent in the outside world before somehow winding up in the perpetual testing cycle she was in now. She might have only remembered snippets of it, but she still knew she was the product of her memories and experiences. Little, on the other hand, didn’t have those memories or anything like them. She wasn’t human, she had never been even remotely human- for that made so much sense when Blue looked back- and yet she spoke and felt and feared and cared and was now clearly experiencing grief.

She may have been artificial, but there was no doubt that she had a damn potent personality.

“Gone,” Little whimpered, drawing Blue’s attention as she touched the edge of the core’s empty faceplate again before withdrawing into herself and looking up at her more steadfast friend. “Gone...”

“Yes.” Blue was becoming even more blunt than she had been before the escapade that had nearly resulted in her death. Slightly unsteady from her wound, she got to her feet, and offered her good arm to her companion.

“Yes, it’s gone. But I have seen more.” Little’s face, turned up to face her from the ground, lit up. Her central eye expanded and brightened as well, the shutters clicking into an expression of confused happiness over the warm glow of her optic.

“Not for a while, Little. I only saw ones like this recently,” she gestured to the hollow core, and as Little stood up she brought it with her to hang at her side in the hand that didn’t wield her portal device. “But, I’ve spoken to some. You want to find them?”

“Yes! Friends! Blue and Little and Cores, all friends. Please find!”

Instinctively, through the grogginess of her shock and lingering despair, Blue ducked back. As far as she’d seen, no beams had locked onto her. Still, there was the blast of turret fire, and she expected to see the bullets pock holes in the panels past the pillar. However, an unexpected, not-very-turretty voice cried out instead.

“Aa-Aaaah!!”

Shock forced her from the security of her pole, and shakily onto her feet. A dart of white in a small alcove disappeared before she could focus on it, and she saw the red beam of the turret also looking for its lost target. Before it could turn around to focus on her, a bolt of red shot past from her left, and Blue stumbled in panic, uncertain as to what that even was-

A turret appeared through the red portal that had opened up abruptly to her right, falling onto its side and squealing, before shutting down harmlessly.

Quicker than she could process or keep up with, the other remaining turrets around the room became aware of her presence; standing dazed and confused in the middle of the chamber in her blood soaked coat and making for an incredibly easy target. One by one they began to focus on her.

Even quicker still, before they could even finalize their mark on her, their beams were disappearing and they were teleporting around the room to random positions. Groggily, she realized they weren’t teleporting of their own volition, but were being repositioned with portals from one place to another; invariably getting knocked over in the process and offering quiet pleas for redemption before they fell entirely silent.

A tiny, timid, bleary thought reared its head, that perhaps she wasn’t entirely alone her after all, perhaps she’d not been completely wrong, perhaps, perhaps, Orange had made her own way back here too, and maybe, maybe-

A few paces in front of her a yellow portal opened on the floor, and a turret fell through it upside down, its beam trying hard to focus on her as it flew into the air feet first. Somehow, ridiculously, she couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of the very deadly robot as it struggled to keep its little beam steady, even as it fell back through the portal and clattered to its side somewhere behind her.

Turning around to see where it had landed, Blue felt her heart leap terrified into her throat and raised her portal gun as best she could, as if it were a more offensive weapon, and longed for the hollow core she’d dropped during the attack.

There was the biggest turret she’d ever seen, and it was walking, well, sort of- stumbling- out of the alcove, a white mass on legs with a sort of frilled yellow skirt that was certainly unusual, she’d never known the turrets to be concerned with any sort of fashion-

Her mind reeled and scrabbled and eventually crawled over the answer at the same time as the figure turned around to face her. Blue’s heart leapt for the second time, but this time with joy and relief and happiness that she hadn’t really expected to feel again, not after her realizations while curled bleeding behind the pillar. As the terror ebbed out of her and her vision cleared, she recognized the android- taller than a turret but smaller than herself- staring at her and lowering the humming portal device that had cleared the room of the ambush sentries.

“Blue...”

“Little!”

For the first time, Blue was the louder and more enthusiastic of the two, and despite the injury she’d sustained she gave an excited, unintelligible cry and ran the last few metres to her short friend.

Although she wasn’t entirely sure if her small companion understood hugs properly- given that Little had apparently never had a human upbringing doused in body language- the pint sized android collapsed into it anyway, as Blue grabbed her into a hug with her good arm and half of her wounded one.

Now that the immediate threat of the turrets had abated, neither of them could summon the energy to move for a good few minutes, glad to be alive, and somehow- ridiculously- even more glad not to be alone.

Eventually Blue noticed that her companion was an unusual combination of oddly still, quiet, and rather shaky, and they stepped apart. Although she was still dizzy and muddled-minded from her run in with the turrets and the stressful heartache of remembering her unpleasant history with this room, she worked hard to focus on Little and give her a more thorough look, and found the results worrying.

The smaller android was no longer the pristine little thing she had been. Her freckle marked face was dirty and scratched, in a deceptively human way no less; her white torso and arms were grubby and stained with something that looked like watermarks- and yes, it must have been, because her boots were similarly discoloured, and a dirty puddle was forming around her heels as the remaining water trickled through her systems and leaked out from her ankles. Her portal device was also looking very worse for wear; both of them had clearly been bumped, scraped, dropped and dinged on the journey that had brought them here outside the testing tracks.

She still swayed anxiously from foot to foot, but the motion was less enthusiastic than before, and accompanied by a tentativeness that Blue gradually interpreted as discomfort, as if the action were painful to perform but Little was absent-mindedly continuing it anyway.

Before she could get the chance to ask, or suggest that Little try standing still if her feet were hurting her, her grey eyed companion jerked and made a small, terse noise, followed by a quiet electric crack. A spray of bright sparks shot from her third eye, spilling from the metal casing as the yellow aperture itself flipped and blinked with a flickering shudder and a noisy klickt-kl-klickt of the steel shutters.

Shockingly she seemed to barely notice, and as the sparks faded against the floor or fizzled out in the small puddle, Little refocused and looked at Blue with concern. Finally, the taller of the two spoke, first to break the silence between them that was somewhere between awkward, surprised, happy, and severely confused.

“You left the tests to come here.”

Little nodded, scuffling her feet absently in the thin puddle of water, yelping and jumping to the side as it threw tiny droplets at the movement. Evidently she was frightened of the water, and Blue wondered how she’d gotten so wet in the first place.

“Yes, I-I-I... yy-yyy-yes.”

Something about her seemed more timid than ever before, as if she were afraid to speak further for some reason. Words had always come so easily to her earlier, even if they weren’t always sensible or entirely on topic. Blue quickly recognized it as guilt, although Little herself seemed to have no idea what was causing the odd, frightened feeling.

Blue found herself suffering her own for leaving her smaller friend to navigate all the way here by herself, without warning or explanation. The path had clearly not been easy, and more so, Blue could tell that Little had come willingly and against the will of the Voice, which must have been no easy feat for her either. Between the fear of the Voice, the maintenance areas and whatever sort of pressure the Itch put her under, Blue innately knew she should appreciate that Little had chosen her over all of it.

“Thank you.”

Peering anxiously, Little’s central optic glowed marginally brighter, fighting against the red light that bathed the chamber before she spoke. “Friends....? Blue and Little? T... Together? Maybe?”

Carefully Blue reached out with her injured arm, and tried to take her companion’s hand, grateful that Little showed no greater resistance than slight bewilderment- it was hard enough to move her wounded elbow already- and gripped her gloved grey fingers gently.

“Of course friends. Always friends. I’m sorry for leaving you, Little. Together now, I promise.”

Little looked as someone had just lifted the world off her shoulders, and despite the twitches that flicked through her sending the occasional sparks from her joints or the wet squelch of her feet, she straightened and smiled brightly, cheerfully; almost the same as before except for the grubby smears and scrapes she carried now.

Still holding her companion’s hand lightly, Blue lead them both to her previous spot- for it still felt slightly safer than sitting out in the open- and let herself sink into a crouch behind the pillar in the shallow alcove in the floor. Little mimicked, watching with bright eyed concern and a series of small shudders and too many blinks in quick succession.

Reaching up, Blue unwrapped the scarf the colour of her namesake from around her neck- although she’d never admit it, it was something of a comfort blanket, and she had always worn it as long as she could remember, even though the temperatures in the facility were fairly modulated and a scarf was more of a hindrance than a help during testing. None the less, it would prove useful now.

Carefully wriggling out of her coat, mindful of the cables around her shoulders, she dropped the heavy black thing to the ground so that she could see her red soaked sleeve underneath, and bit back a groan of displeasure. It wasn’t a deadly wound, but really, she should have bandaged it earlier, and now, she couldn’t quite figure out why she didn’t.

Offering one end of the scarf to Little, she mimed holding it tight, and the smaller android complied immediately, removing her still glowing portal device and setting it on the floor in order to help with both hands, even without any idea what was going on.

Slowly, Blue began to wrap the scarf around her elbow, wincing occasionally, but pulling it tight with her good hand, and feeling some comfort from the pressure of her make-shift bandage. Once she’d made a start on it, she smiled over at her companion.

“Little. Tell me what happened? How you found me?”

Blue simply stood, wracked with frustration, guilt, shame, horror, and a totally encompassing despair that dragged her under so quickly she’d hit rock bottom before the first bullets were fired.

One whizzed past her shoulder, miraculously a misfire, and another dug itself with a hideous crunch into the pillar beside her.

The third found its mark, sinking deep into her elbow, causing her to cry out in pain and drop the hollow core she’d carried all this way with a metallic clang. All her clarity for action seemed to have suddenly failed her, and all that remained was the far less pleasant or useful clarity of suppressed memories.

She could almost see the familiar figure of Orange, running across the chamber, ducking between pillars, beckoning, trying to aim, defiant of the turret beams that centred on her like a dozen sharp red needles-

Another bullet found its mark on Blue, but was obscured from fatality by bouncing off the metal rim of her third eye, though it was still sharp enough to drag her part of the way out of the past. The searing pain in her elbow pulled her the rest of the way back to reality, and barely able to focus, she did the only thing she could process in that moment.

Blue ran for cover.

Crawling behind one of the pillars, sinking into a small recess in the floor, she turned around quickly to check for any of the lasers fixing on her, or any childish, synthesized voice confirming it could see her.

“Are you still there? Hello? Where’d you go?”

“Nap time,” said one almost directly above her that she hadn’t even noticed when she’d crawled, panicked, into the shallow crevasse. As she watched, the darting red beam raked across the floor a step or two outside of her recess, then faded. Although she couldn’t see the little robotic sentry, it was close enough she could hear its mechanics whirring quietly as it entered its sleep mode.

Backing as far as she could into her space, Blue dared to glance at her elbow. The bullet had torn a great hole through her left sleeve and sunk into her forearm- she was in a brief delirium, thankful for being right handed, so at least she could still use her portal device- and appeared to have only narrowly missed both bones and major arteries. However, It was suddenly much harder to move her fingers, and they tingled to their very tips when she tried, although how she could even feel that over the pain was a mystery to her.

Despite the initial reaction, her third eye also ached where it had been damaged, albeit she was only very dimly aware she’d been shot there. It squinted and rolled and settled for a half-lidded expression of exhaustion that would change as little as possible so as to avoid the discomfort of opening and dosing the shutters behind a damaged casing.

In an effort not to focus on the red stain seeping through the dark sleeve of her heavy coat, Blue turned her attentions to her portal device and inspected it as if expecting to find anything new worth seeing. There weren’t any portalable surfaces in sight, and if she stepped out of this small alcove the turret above her would be awake faster than she could locate somewhere safe to go.

She was quite trapped.

Even if she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sure she’d have had the strength to pick herself up and move on. As long as she’d remembered, that’s what she’d done.

Long fall? Be grateful you have those damn boots. Pick yourself up and continue testing.

Dropped your only cube in the toxic acid pit? You’re clever enough to think of a new way. Pick yourself up and continue testing.

Glancing turret fire? At least you’re quick on your feet and still alive. Pick yourself up and continue testing.

She wasn’t a quitter, but never before had Blue been able to sit back, assess her options, and wonder “why bother?” The path she’d followed had been for nothing; it had been a dead end before and it was a dead end again now, perhaps quite literally if she didn’t stop bleeding sometime soon. She knew the same attack had crippled herself and Orange when they’d first been ambushed in this very chamber, and even then, close to death, she’d fought it, won, and carried on- accepted the life-saving upgrade that had made her the odd amalgam of robot and human that she was now- a sort of smooshed together organic android- and kept testing.

And then there’d been Little, and she hadn’t been testing alone.

Regardless, she’d had such faith in her patchy, unformed memories- they’d seemed so certain and clear at the time- that she’d gone solo again. It hadn’t seemed so bad at the time, a simple matter of fact, but now that she thought back over it, Blue wondered if maybe it hadn’t been fair to leave Little so abruptly, and without making a thorough effort to explain. Even if the tiny android did suffer from the Itch.

But Orange wasn’t here, and somehow as the dread re-consumed her, Blue knew Orange was not ever going to be here. Perhaps it was pessimism, or perhaps it was that resilient side of her that she’d pressed into a back room of her mind, the part that held the unpleasant memories that had been reorganized far out of reach by her re-creator to ensure that she completed tests and didn’t wallow in misery.

Ha. Even the Voice seemed to have disappeared now; it hadn’t even returned over the rusted speaker squares to berate her for getting shot, or slipping up her game. Lowering her gun into her lap, Blue leaned back against the pillar behind her and stared up towards a rather unimpressive patch of wall opposite, and began counting the turret beams.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven- and a half if you count that one sort of on an angle in the corner.

Delirious with the pain of her arm, the blood loss, and the aching depressive feeling of guilt and total failure- not just for herself but for both her testing partners- Blue counted them again. And again. Then she counted the panels she could see in the wall ahead of her.

She counted whatever she could see without moving or expending the energy that was rapidly leaving her via the wound in her arm. Uncharacteristically stupefied, she was simply too stressed and too shocked to even think about bandaging it to stop the flow when all she could do was number things up to about ten and relive the screams in her past and the vision of Orange- tall and bright and clever and the colour of autumn in Colorado- gasping and dying in the medical bay.

Eventually she counted the turret beams again for the umpteenth time, and paused. Frowning, she squeezed her eyes shut, and counted again, wondering if the blood loss was finally getting to her and her vision was getting worse than usual. It did seem a bit more blurry, now that she thought about it, but she was sure there were now only five little red lasers sighting on the dirty brown panels, and unless she was so addled by events she couldn’t count past six—

As she watched, another beam darted out of her field of vision, and she sat up a little straighter in surprise. A small noise echoed quietly, a soft, repetitive “ow ow owww” noise in the familiar voice of the red eyed sentries before it was silent again. She hadn’t been listening very hard, lost in her own thoughts and reverie and misfortune, but now that she tuned back into her audio processors, she realized the small voices were occasionally calling out.

“I see you! Dispensing product.” There was the clatter of bullets hitting the wall somewhere on the other side of the room, and then the same bullets falling to the floor, followed by another cry of alarm as another turret was upset in some manner.

Perhaps they were malfunctioning, or the Voice had returned to make a mock of her. Either way, a tiny spark of hope flared inside her, because if there were something defective with the turrets, then maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to navigate her way out of here and get to—

Blue had no idea where else to go, or what else there was. For all she knew, given she’d never actually managed to find a viable escape route in the first place, there might not even have ever been a way to break out of the facility. But the urge for freedom still hounded her, like her own sort of itch in a way; a deep longing for night skies and dawn clouds.

The distressed small voice of the sentries were suddenly a lot closer, and she realized the one above her—

“Hey! Put me down! Put me dowww-owowoww... “

She’d drawn back as the white thing was thrown, firing aimlessly in circles, off the small ledge above her and into the narrow moat-like crack in the floor just a few feet ahead. On its side, the small beam darted towards her, and she locked up in shock and terror, but the little red eye simply observed her and whispered a quiet, “I don’t hate you,” before closing and falling silent.

Two other beams disappeared from the wall, and Blue decided that no matter how desolate she felt or how much her elbow hurt, there was no point in sitting there feeling sorry for herself.  It was time to investigate. At least to make sure that no more were going to be thrown into her vicinity and risk shooting her even more thoroughly than before. Also, with the immediate threat of the turret above her gone, the risks of staying might be greater than the ones of getting her A into G.

Crawling out carefully, and favouring her wounded arm, she crouched near the pillar that had been offering her protection thus far and tried to get the strength to support her portal gun properly. Eventually, giving up on doing much more than holding her left fist against the bottom of her device- her fingers wouldn’t uncurl without a bolt of pain- she leaned out around the edge of the pole. She was cautious, peered into the red-lit chamber, looking for the tracking beams or the white shell of the deadly little robots.

Without warning, and she hadn’t even seen either of the things she was looking for, she heard the cheerful little voice she was dreading, and bristled.

“Target Acquired!”

At least, the Voice was very insistent and certain that she had. If at any point Blue had wondered why the Voice wasn’t as persistently hounding as usual, it was because the owner of it had Her attentions divided between the two androids. At first, this had meant She needed to focus on security cameras quite far apart across the facility; but now they were drawing nearer, and the gap was closing. But they remained in the maintenance shafts and offices and back-stage areas where She was, infuriatingly, unable to do anything but offer words of disapproval.

“You’re not even going the right way.”

Despite the discouragement from the Voice, Little had an odd, fierce, internal feeling that she was following. It was figuratively a gut feeling, but, lacking the necessary organs, Little just took it to be her core processor pulling her towards her purpose.

She had to find Blue. The thought filled her and her mistakes plagued her and her desperation drove her on; she had to find her friend, apologize, so they could- together and- togetherness. That was all she had left.

“Where do you think you’re going? Because I don’t think you’re going where you think you’re going.”

However, following the feeling had not been easy. If it hadn’t been for the sheer excited ache that told her she was Going The Right Way and Doing The Right Thing, she would have turned back in fright quite some time ago.

After her escape through the broken office window, Little had navigated down some dingy stairs that creaked and crumbled underfoot, and finally found herself in an area that steamed and smoked and gave a distant thumping. She could spot portalable surfaces through mesh grates in the floor; other times she had to aim and shoot in perfect time through a whisking, whirling fan that she knew innately would dash her into hundreds of white and yellow bits if she were to lose her balance.

The maintenance areas were no comfort to Little whatsoever. Unlike Blue, she found the rusted shafts and broken tubes and lairy red graffiti scrawl telling her “This way!” completely haunting. Their untamed wildness was terrifying to the small android, who found familiarity and respite in confined puzzles, deathly lasers and success measured in open doors with yellow ticks.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

 So there had been that to try and put her off at first, along with the Voice’s immediate negativity the second she’d stepped from the office with her newly charged battery.

And then there had been fast moving devices, which were definitely trying to get her. Initially she had thought they were something to do with the Voice as well- the huge metal poles that were as tall as the ceiling and almost as wide around as the Excursion Funnel- and that perhaps they were under Her control,a weapon for smashing small scared androids that didn’t do as they were told.

But on consultation of her Blueprint database, Little realized that they weren’t. The Voice was being surprisingly truthful in her complaints of not knowing what was happening out in these areas. The central AI mainframe didn’t reach these parts the way it did the chambers, and therefore these pistons, however truly dangerous, were not going to change rhythm and slam at her suddenly like an arm-controlled wall panel.

“You really shouldn’t be here. This isn’t safe for you.”

The hammering devices had an automatic rhythm, purely mechanical, and after a few moments assessing each one, Little was able to feel the beat of them in her metal joints; the deep, heavy booms as a piston hit its mark against the wall echoing up into her through the floor.

So she navigated onwards; this way, that way, upwards, downwards, through here, over that, and jump.

She dropped down for a terrifying moment between the pistons, the huge metal poles slamming past her and just barely missing- for she had considered the timing of this one very well before leaping- the sounds of their collision shaking the tall shaft, until she fell through the portal in the floor and sent herself sailing at a horizontal from another, landing on a distant piston and crouching, riding it forward.

Nearby, but not near enough, Blue was moving forwards too, full of determination and tenacity and the will to survive, and stubbornly ignoring a lot else. Like Little, she was following a gut feeling as well, but unlike Little, Blue’s journey was pockmarked with mental arguments for and against-

--In contrast, and at the same time as Blue ignored her better judgement, Little trusted her instincts. Even when they asked her to jump into the dark off the broken catwalk into the portal below and she was scared. But she had to find her partner, her companion, her friend--

One thought, forefront and strongest and the one Blue indulged, filled her with an aggressive excitement for freedom, and confirmed that she recognized bits and pieces of the path she was taking. A scrawled face in the graffiti, a lonely radio high up and out of reach that fuzzed with the static of a long dead broadcast, a spray of shattered glass from a broken Pneumatic Diversity Vent, the echoing hollow of an empty elevator shaft.

--Little followed them all the way to a dead end where the colossal boom of the pistons had become a distant reverb in her bones. She followed them to the solid wall at the end of a maze of pathways, and no convenient exit appeared to present itself no matter how many times she turned around or fired her yellow and red portals fruitlessly against the every surface--

The second thought, quiet and pitiful and crushed by her frantic optimism about her escape, whimpered and whined and warned her about the familiarity of the path. It wasn’t a blessing to recognize the path she’d taken the first time, side by side with Orange, because they hadn’t made it, had they? There was something lurking, and with every step she was getting closer, and the sad little voice screamed and wailed at her from the mental room she’d locked it away in. Wrong way. Go back. Go back. Wrong way!

--How could this be? She had trusted it! Trusted the feeling, the deep pull inside her, and ignored her fears and inhibitions, the twitching shiver that sent small bright sparks from her optic, and the nasty, stinging Itch that gnawed down her spine to her knees and elbows. She hit the wall in anxious desperation, and there, just above her head, a small rectangular panel of thin louvers--

But this was it. After so long, after what she vaguely knew to be years of her life trapped inside the testing facility, Blue was going to get out of here. Already she’d trusted her determination, never second guessing, and gotten free of the test chambers. She’d escaped the medical bay and the hallway of eyes, she’d navigated through countless hauntingly empty offices, she’d even found own her way into these wild, untamed maintenance areas where the walls were damp and the snaking shape of a leafless vine occasionally twisted its way through the cracks.

--The space was small, incredibly thin and cramped an-d if she’d known the word- claustrophobic. A dark, tinny little ventilation shaft that creaked and groaned underneath her weight and threatened to drop her at any second, now marked her way forwards, and thank God she was so small that she could fit, because for a moment there--

Even the Voice was hardly hassling her any more, as she ran further and further beyond its reach. Only occasionally did she hear it, blurting from a scratchy little speaker with a crackle of static to dissuade her, to tell her she was going the wrong way- ha!- or to say that she’d regret it all very soon.

--In the dark below, illuminated by the faint yellow haze from her third eye- for Little had no idea how to use her flashlight, if she even had one- she could see something reflecting and shiny. Perhaps polished metal floor? It was so dark, but a floor of any sort was a good start, so she wriggled forwards, freeing her arms and shoulders from the open end of the thin shaft, eventually tumbling face first the short distance--

 Too obstinate to listen to anything that might delay her, or take away her focus upon her goal, Blue gritted her jaw with determination, pushed aside her wary instincts in favour of her objective, ignored any negativity that threatened to make her think about past failures, and navigated upwards-

--hadn’t been a metal floor at all, --

upwards-

-- but a long shaft submerged in a few inches of stale, stagnant water, and it hurt far more than the thud of unrelenting metal she’d been expecting--

upwards-

 --only shallow, but it had splashed all over her as she'd landed without warning on her hands and knees --

And upwards again, rising level after level on the rusted, poorly lit catwalks, endlessly working towards her unseen goal, until she had to aim her portal device through the metal grid into the area above it.

-- seeping through the high collar of her neckline, down her arms along her elbows, her wrists, the seams of her shoulders and the joints of her knees, stinging and aching and burning in her wires as if it really were toxic acid--

 And the small voice in her memory, something it recalled patchily from before she’d been upgraded to have a higher quality digital recollection, screamed and cried and begged, because it remembered what had happened last time. It was nearly audible, a distant cry, coming from somewhere Blue barely recognized as within herself.

-- Little warbled with pain and panic, getting to her feet and running blind, as her first eye flickered and spun in its socket to dry itself out, water leaking from the metal plates, desperate to avoid a complete short circuit, and not alone, please, please—

Setting one portal on the other side of the grid, Blue placed its companion in front of her, and stepped through into the otherwise unreachable area with a proud huff. The room she entered was huge, a cavern with a few tall pillars in the centre of the floor reaching into a faraway ceiling that was blurred from distance under the scrutiny of her less than perfect eyesight.

--together- togetherness- please- She was so close, she could feel it--

Finally, with a cry that nearly made her stumble, the squealing voice inside Blue broke through, and instead of trying to stop the stubborn streak that had taken control, it tackled her sensible side. The side that knew she’d been here before, in this very room; that remembered it clearly, and knew immediately that she’d acted irrationally.

Even as she realized the danger, Blue heard the sound of the panel behind her creak, and when her portal device shuddered dark in her hands, she knew without turning around that her escape was gone.

Many things happened at once, just like the previous time they’d come here. Even as the room was bathed in a glowing red- some sort of spotlight high from that distant ceiling- and a wailing siren filled the air as all around the cavern walls no less than twenty small alcoves began to open, Blue searched desperately for her partner.

This was the end of the line, and she remembered it so clearly now; they’d walked into exactly the same ambush last time. But, that meant that Orange had to be here somewhere, hiding, waiting for her to return, so that they could escape. Orange had to be...

Thin darting lights spun across her vision, too many to count, their tiny beams searching, whipping around the room from every conceivable angle. Several of them settled on her with tiny excited cries that made her blood turn to ice and her third eye shrink in its casing, pulling back into itself for safety, a darting sliver of blue behind shutters squeezed almost shut in panic.

“I see you! There you are! Target acquired.”

Much too late, Blue’s stubborn side caved away and she realized the magnitude of her mistake, and the denial she’d been desperately holding onto for the last half of her escape reminded her that they’d never made it any further than this. That they’d reached here, and met the clattering of bullets, the burning red of turret fire, the small deceptively friendly voices, an awful scream of pain-

Down an array of twisted catwalks, past half open doorways and dimly lit offices, she ignored them all, no longer interested in exploring their secrets. Occasionally she swung around corners so fast that her free arm flung the heavy core’s empty shell out in front of her and it hit the wall; she was only carrying it out of instinct now, more than interest or reason, her fingers clasped and unrelenting around the top handle without any conscious effort.

Rounding another corner, tearing through the open doorway in her path and stumbling over the long white case of a modern computer tower that had been left carelessly on the floor, she tried not to focus on anything. It was a dangerous tactic, especially for Blue who had always been calm, calculating and a look-before-you-leap sort of person, but the alternative was to think about her third eye, and the medical procedure that had fused it with her and made her whatever she was now.

She didn’t remember the incident, per-say, and there was something else fuzzy and awful about that first memory of waking up in the medical bay, something really crucial that she ought to know about. However instead of prying into it with her regular intense inquisitiveness, she was just denying the whole lot.

But even without the memory, Blue retained her intelligence; and aimlessly wondered spitefully how had she never managed to question it before? She wasn’t corrupt, like Little, and she wasn’t unworldly either. Unlike the smaller android Blue knew she’d been human before she’d tested; unlike the artificial intelligences confined to the insides of Aperture Laboratories, she’d lived a life, she’d known things, and she’d been smart- without conceit- but she’d always been fond of science.

And yet you woke up one day with a giant eye and a half-dozen computer programs in your head and thought nothing of it?

Blue could have screamed at herself. If the reckless behaviour she was exhibiting now was uncharacteristic, it was just the icing on the figurative cake that had been years of negligence to question what was right in front of her.

Most importantly, where did that leave her now? So she was an android, sort of thing? Okay.

She’d never really had a problem with that before; her third eye didn’t cause her any grief, it didn’t cause any pain, in fact it was downright useful at times with its flashlight and built in lie-detector. And the more she thought about it, she hadn’t had to eat or drink for a ridiculously long time, and even just thinking about icing cakes made her recall afternoons in the sun and sandwiches in the grass.

Yes, eating and drinking had definitely been a part of her life before. Her garbled memories at least gave her that with clarity. Perhaps that change in her biology was for the best, as the most consumable thing she’d ever seen down here was probably the toxic goo, and hunger and thirst or any repercussions for not sating them wouldn’t have been particularly useful to testing, or escaping.

Blue decided she could live with being a... a whatever she was.

She was alive right now, and functioning well enough; so that was as good a start as any and she wasn’t the sort to throw things away just for the sake of it, no matter how stressful. She’d been human before, apparently in a way that Little hadn’t been despite the smaller android’s equally human appearance, and now she was just... human with something extra. Human 2.0.

The idea of foreign bodies- like the eye of some squat little robot- being medically grafted into her was still terrifying and sickening and made her cold to the pit of her empty stomach, especially because the procedure had been out of her control. But it wasn’t unliveable.

Her third eye was now a familiar part of her, even if it had originally been a part of something else, and she knew sure enough she’d coped with it these past million steps at least. She’d never questioned it before, and although it was a shock to start doing so, she slowly came to imagine it something like being told one had an unknown artificial limb or transplanted organ; it wouldn’t be rational to give it up just for the discovery that it wasn’t innately yours.

Worse still, and unshakeable, was the creeping knowledge that the Voice had most certainly done this; perhaps to make her a better test subject and more resilient, a way of upgrading humans in the initiative so that-

What about Orange?

If her running had required any conscious effort, she would have stopped dead in her tracks the way her mind did at the thought. If she had been upgraded, then surely Orange must have been too.

However, racking her memories, grabbing and pulling forwards the brief and flickering ones she had of her first testing companion, Blue noticed now how she never had before, that in none of the memories did the taller human girl who’d been her partner in science have any sort of robotic third eye. The orange she was apparently named for seemed to come from the colour of her outfit, some sort of zip up jacket, with a square pocket where her third eye should have been, and no sign of metal or cabling anywhere.

Perhaps that was the colour she had always remembered, the vibrant and hot tangerine hue of ‘lab rat orange’ that was far removed from Little’s goldenrod yellow. It was one of the reasons- besides her stature- why the small android who’d been presented as her second testing partner had never quite matched her memories of the Co-Operative Tests.

Only the vaguest recollection of an orange eye was available to her, like the one she had seen on the wall when the turret-bodied robot had been projected there. It was fuzzy and dark and full of static and screams and it was back in that room, so in outright denial, Blue pushed it away.

Orange mustn’t have had the procedure. There was no memory of them testing together afterwards; she must have somehow escaped, and maybe that was how they’d been separated.

And that’s all there was to it. So Blue kept running, letting her mind unconsciously take in her surroundings and guide her down familiar paths towards the escape she was certain was coming, along the route she’d taken once before with her taller friend, and where they’d inevitably be reunited, and finally break out of this hell. That’s what would happen. That was what would happen.

In a part of her, Blue knew that this thought process was wrong. The quietly intelligent part of her, the part that knew she was lying to herself, a nasty, stubborn part of her that tried to make her see the truth for the sake of truth no matter how painful; the part that had made sure she’d realized that Little was corrupt, to accept her small friend had the Itch and cared most of all about testing, that the friendly android wasn’t and never had been human, that she herself was hardly human anymore-

There was only one part of her bigger and more persistent than the truth seeking, curiously intellectual part; and it was the stubbornly strong willed part of her that was rather violently opposed to not-surviving. And in that moment where they conflicted, the latter won out, and squashed aside revelations and realizations for lightness of foot, for accuracy of aim, and for a desperate, clawing need to keep faith.

She had thought there had been something creepy about the empty-eyed personality cores, but even worse was the corridor she found herself in now. In various stages of construction, deconstruction, or some state of assembly in-between or outside of the norm- and in some cases even rigged up inside strange yellow support bars- innumerable eyes stared at her all down the length of the narrow walkway.

That was creepy enough, but there was one thing even worse than a hallway full of blinking disembodied eyes that watched your every step with complete awareness. These eyes weren't just any eyes, and they weren't of all different colours like the cores on the paper, or the ones she'd seen by happenstance while testing. These eyes were all the same. A very familiar, cyber blue.

They were her eyes.

Or well, her eye. The single bright blue eye within her waist had become a pinprick of confusion and concern, a small frightened light in the digitally dark void that it sat in, encased within the metal ring that held the whole abhorrent contraption in her body.

And all of these ones staring emptily back at her, they were the same. Exactly the same, although they lacked the rest of her around them. One nearby sat overturned on a desk, with white scattered parts all around, mechanical limbs and smoothly moulded panels that may have been pieces for an exterior shell, something that might have stood in place of her human body.

Her heart felt about to hammer itself to death on her ribs, and her grip on the hollow core had become so slack the thing was in real danger of being dropped and making an awful noise on the tiled floor.

First she tried shutting her eyes, all three of them, and soaking in the relative quiet of the room.

With her eyes closed to the horrible sight of the corridor, she realized her grip on the core was poor, and reaffirmed it. Blue also became aware how shallow and fast her breathing had become, and with a moment's focus and a few forced, slow, deep breaths, she was able to even it out again to a more acceptable level.

No matter how hard she wished, tried, or convinced herself though, when she opened her eyes, the hallway of blinking, silent eyes- so much the same- was still there, watching her.

She turned to her right, her focus automatically slipping away to try and find something- anything- else more pleasant, and with relief she saw a doorway just past a nearby table. As she darted towards it, the eye on the desk, held in place by one of the unusual yellow cages, followed her soundlessly. Its dark pupil was huge with interest, but she ignored it as best as she could.

Once inside the room, she gently pushed the door shut behind her and leaned her back against it.

There was an uneasy pain in her stomach, somewhere behind her additional eye, and if she'd eaten anything lately, the pain meant that the food would have come right up again. Thankfully, depending on how you looked at it, food was a privilege she hadn't had for quite a long time, so her stomach had nothing to give her. Instead, her whole body ached and trembled with the sort of sickness and confusion that borders on the understanding of something quite awful, and something weak in her throat threatened to turn itself into a sob.

Swallowing it down, because there wasn't time for this sort of a breakdown now when she was on the verge of escape, Blue tried to force the nagging concept from her mind.

Why did she have that eye? How did it get there? It wasn't always there, she wasn't always like this, so why-why-why--

The new room was dark; most likely its single overhead light had given out after years of being left burning and abandoned. Without questioning why she had it, Blue accessed her third eye, and turned on her inbuilt flashlight.

A soft glow immediately filled the room, wavering and flickering slightly from her own tremors. Combined with the colour and the cerulean light’s inability to properly illuminate the darker shadows of the room, the effect was something like being at the bottom of a shallow sea bed.

This room was different to the last ones she had found; it wasn’t an office, and despite its length it wasn’t a hallway. The area was far too cluttered for one, with shelves and cabinets and strange long-dead computer monitors that stood about the place on sticks like silent sentries. Sidling around them, she just about jumped when something crunched underfoot; defensively bringing the empty core she was carrying around her in a tight arc just in case.

When nothing leapt out of the half-lit blue shadows to grab her or shoot lasers, she gradually untensed, and focused down. She’d stepped on some sort of glass bottle; the thing had shattered under her toes and a clear, sticky puddle now darkened the tile.

There wasn’t much to salvage of the thing, but by picking around carefully in the shards she found one larger shattered piece still held together by a label that had been affixed to the outside of the glass.

“PCN” it declared in huge, unmissably thick black letters, and underneath in smaller print “IV 250-500MG”.

The remainder of the text was either illegible from age, torn off, or smudged after getting wet with the former contents of the bottle. She was fairly certain it would have been out of her understanding anyway, but she thrilled over finding all these delightfully human traces around these external areas of the facility.

Graffiti and pieces of paper and party hat magnets and knocked over coffee cups; it was all so alive and wonderful and so unlike the robotic, constant Voice.

Making her way deeper into the room, Blue took care to step slowly. Although she mightn’t have known what exactly PCN was, any product found in Aperture was likely not something she wanted to get on her shoes more than necessary; the only other liquid she had frequent exposure to was the toxic goo that filled moats in the testing chambers and it corroded even the sturdy storage cubes in seconds. But so far so good on her boots not dissolving on the bottom.

Finally she came upon a recess, lead to it by the fact that it was the only corner of the new room (or perhaps set of rooms, she was beginning to think, as she navigated through the area and found it much larger than she’d first thought) that had a working light. The inset alcove joined immediately onto the rest of the dark room or rooms, but she noticed that there was a set of hinges on an empty doorway; so perhaps it had once been separate.

A single, long table sat in the middle of the space, and by the tube light above, she could see two huge vents opening in the ceiling; like the sort that might drop cubes or testing elements, the same kind she’d seen carrying turrets and boxes spiralling about the humming mists of the open caverns of the facility.

Half expecting them to drop two of the live, red eyed little sentries down at any moment, she made sure to keep her swinging arm at the ready.

This room looked far less dilapidated than the one previously, or even the offices she’d passed through earlier. There was a sort of antiseptic feel to the whole thing, and aside from a dark stain that spread from the table to the floor as if someone had dropped several cups of really strong coffee, the place was fairly clean. It even lacked the century’s worth of dust that she’d come to expect in the office areas, habitually breathing through her nose so as to limit the sneezing.

When no turrets appeared from the roof to shoot at her, she’d just decided that there was nothing more in this place she needed to see, when she noticed the quiet humming. Scouting the room, she realized that the humming was coming from a form of computer sitting high on a shelf, a newer model, leaving the desktops she’d become accustomed to so far behind in the dust she hadn’t even realized what this one was at first.

Heading over to it, Blue poked a few buttons experimentally, dimly aware that the thing itself was on from the warmth of the machine and a small blinking light, but the monitor was off. After a moment or two of pressing all sorts of small casing buttons- the thing lacked a keyboard of any sort- she located a cable behind the unit.

As soon as she plugged it in, it shot a bright light directly at her. She shrieked, ducking to the floor, dimly reminded of how she was not supposed to look into the operational end of the device and praying that it wasn’t a new form of sentry weapon. After a minute or so waiting, hiding out of the line of sight of the bright beam now shining above her, she reached up to wave her hand in it.

Nothing. No small voice or pin-prick focus of the beam on her hand as a target.

However on her palm appeared not just the light, but colours and thick, smudgy shapes. Turning around to follow the path of the beam, Blue almost gasped in surprise- something she was not often wont to do- because the far wall of the room was now sprawled with graphics.

As she watched, a series of small lines and orange stripes pulled themselves together in the projected image. After a moment of spinning and building, they’d assembled the picture of a figure; a long oval-shaped body that looked sort of like a turret, but standing on a pair of thin legs. Gradually she realized it was some sort of blue-print for a robot.

The text “P-Body” printed in one corner, and in the centre of the robots blueprint body, an orange-red eye opened up, and this time Blue really did gasp.

Memories and information stored in her corroded processor strained and pulled and desperately dragged themselves out of the darkness, and she recalled the orange eye in a different form, and an awful squealing.

As quickly as it had come, the blue-print and the dash of recollection were gone. The lines and shapes projected on the wall unfurled and scattered, then began to reform. Blue was entranced, staring at the display entirely transfixed.

Another shape, similarly robotic, formed itself in the images, headed this time with the letters “ATLAS”. This one was stouter, and had a spherical centre, not unlike the core she was still carrying in her left hand. The eye of this one- opening precisely where she’d have expected had the robot been the leggy personality core that it looked like- made her shriek more than gasp, a quiet shocked sound that sent her staggering backwards towards the projector and bumping it aside. This one did not have an orange-red eye.

Like the corridor outside, it had been her eye staring back at her from the centre of the robot in the blueprints; a bright electric blue, with a wide curious pupil and a lowered top shutter to suggest a vague suspicion.

Her chest was aching, constricted and tight against her will, barely letting her draw in the breaths she needed despite her upgraded systems. In her shock she’d dropped the hollow core and it rolled aimlessly away from her, curled oddly against the wall where she’d backed away.

Dimly through her panic, Blue became aware of the faint clicking hum of the projector, still carrying on through its visual presentation despite the fact that its display had been turned into the corner by her flailing. Steeling herself, and suddenly filled with an apprehensive, but fierce desire for understanding, she grabbed it and turned it back to the far wall.

Again, a different illustration was beamed there through the particles of light; some sort of a blue print for a room, but she’d spent too long not paying attention, and it was already being disassembled before she could take any more from it. The program on the projector continued relentlessly, marching through its series of displays.

Two text slides popped up in quick succession, mostly illegible due to the sheer masses of writing on them that looked to be some sort of code. Parts of said code circled themselves, as if someone within the program were highlighting words or blocks of text, and as the majority of the text faded away to leave the emphasized sections, she made sense of ‘android’ ‘artificial’ and ‘co-operative’, before it was gone again.

Then the small lines and dashes of colour were back, forming themselves into a tall, legged figure the same as they had at the beginning. Some vague understanding of presentations in the back of her addled memory told her that the thing was probably looping.

Feeling more in control of her panic than she had been before- if only because she was resolutely shutting out all the conflicting thoughts about robots and identical blue eyes, dragging herself kicking and screaming back to stoic determination- Blue resolved to waste no more time in returning to the staring hallway and making her way through towards her escape.

With her back to the side-room, staring out into the unlit area that she’d navigated through with her flashlight in order to get here, Blue took a moment to observe the strange angle of hinges at the side of the doorway, and from this distance, she noticed something else. In the wavering blue light, she could see that a path of clumsily scattered wreckage led through strewn bottles, vials and sterile looking equipment towards the doorway where she’d come in, and she’d taken great trepid care not to bump or tread on anything after her incident with the PCN.

“Is this what you wanted?”

In the muggy darkness, she twitched at the suddenly slicing tones of the Voice, and raised the core in her left hand threateningly, even though the world around her was staggeringly still.

Behind her, the tall turret-like robot was disappearing from the projector display to make way for the stout blue one that shared her own central optic. Stubbornly, Blue tried not to look, and instead focused on the floor, and found herself tracking the reddish rust stains under her feet back to the large spill of it across the table and floor.

"Blue."

Something familiar took up a gnawing in her gut, and her third eye gave a worried twirl in its metal socket, as if it could feel it too.

"Blue. Are you even listening to me?"

Lifting her portal device, she inspected the marks along the bottom edge of it. Her device was well worn, dinted and grubby from years of daily use. It was marked and stained from steep drops and tumbling against walls, from close encounters with the burning hot bridges of hard blue sunlight, but it also had the peculiar spatter along the lower edge that Little had noticed quite a long time ago, and that Blue had thought no more of than any of the other signs of wear on it.

Now she noticed that it matched the same, long dried discoloration on the floor of this particular room, and something about that made her feel far colder than the chilled air of the facility. Why was everything suddenly so painful to think about?

Shaking her head, she momentarily allowed her attention to be drawn by the projector screen one last time. The slides with code had just erased themselves, and she expected now to be greeted with the tall, long-legged android that she'd seen at first as the cycle looped back to the beginning.

The lines on the wall assembled themselves into the familiar tall shape, its arms and legs at rest . But as the image formed clearer and an orange eye opened in its centre, Blue realised she had been impossibly wrong. Shock, as violent and wrenching as anything she'd experienced in this past hour, made her legs weak and the room feel as if it had been disposed of all air.

Even though she turned, staggering to escape, she wasn't fast enough to avoid seeing the second figure that assembled in the projector light. The same as the previous; arms and legs and a face- a human face- the mockery of peaceful sleep,  but this time the eye in the centre of the body opened like the bottom of the sea.

"I warned you," the Voice mocked, but it was muddled and far away, scratchy and drowned out by Blue's own voice, screaming. She knew she was making the awful shrieking noise, but she wasn't sure if it was internal or external, if it was all around her or only ringing inside her own head; similar to the first time she'd discovered something she hadn't wanted to, that first memory that some tests were to be taken in pairs.

In her hurry she knocked aside one of the long poles in the dark room, and it and its attached cables clattered noisily to the floor, the empty plastic bag affixed to the top of it disintegrating from age as it connected with the tile. As she charged back through the door half blind in fright, confusion, denial, and the frantic blinking of her third eye causing the flashlight to strobe, she ignored the advice of the sign on the back of the door requesting all employees thoroughly wash their hands before leaving the medical bay.

Stumbling and staggering, off balance with the weight of the core that her fist had sealed shut around, Blue flung herself down the first corridor that had taken her breath away. Her eye blinked back at her from every desk, from shelves, from the floor; and now that her dislike for them staring at her had given way to something else, she noticed what she hadn't noticed before. Between the bright blue eyes there were an equal number of orange eyes, friendly and warm, cheery and the colour of carved pumpkins and autumn leaves down the street.

Blue edged around the small speaker in the wall, walking even more on the tips of her toes than the long fall boots usually forced her to do in an effort to be as silent as possible.

Since waking up under the desk, feeling rested but more anxious than ever to continue her escape, she had navigated her way through a series of abandoned offices and observation rooms. Occasionally she had paused to read particularly comedic mugs- "World’s Best Dad" claimed one and "Who farted?" asked another- or to sift through small piles of paperwork with more meaningless code or the occasional chain-letter.

In one small, dark side room she found a large whiteboard covered in scrawls in a variety of hands and just as many different coloured markers. On the upper corner above a graph she found a drawing, similarly childlike as the one she had folded and put away in her pocket, although unlike the round ones on the paper, this one was a sort of thin curved rectangle with a bright yellow spot in the middle.

A magnet in the shape of a party-hat had been placed on- what she assumed must be- the top of the head, and an arrow pointing to it wrote "I don't think She'll like that". The graphs looked too difficult to work out, given the limited amount of time she was willing to devote to it, so she turned to leave the room and re-enter the narrow carpeted hallway.

It was shortly after then that she'd stumbled on the half-ajar doorway. When she peeked through, she could see clearly that it led out to the tangling misty catwalks again, and she crinkled her nose is dislike; that seemed like a backwards step and she was reluctant to go back out there. However this aspect lacked the blue fog of the atmospheric facility, and instead scorching hot yellow lights were burning down from the low ceiling. Intrigued, she followed it.

These catwalks had a slightly wilder feel to them, with splotches of bright graffiti decorating some of the rough walls, and dangerous drops and dead ends where the metal floor had rusted away. A strange fluid dripped out of a broken pipe that stretched out from the black abyss over the edge, and curved away overhead, leaving a streak of blue on the mesh that squeaked underfoot.

Unfortunately, that was when the Voice had come back again, accosting her suddenly and causing her to jump. But it became quickly apparent, through the Voice's own admittance, that it couldn't do anything to her here. Reassured, Blue marched on, skirting the speakers and saying nothing.

At the end of a particularly long catwalk, a large round blast door stood ominously in the dark, the small orange light glowing disapprovingly until she reached it, and it became green before disappearing all together as the door pulled itself apart.

Something about the room beyond creeped Blue out, and a crawling feeling struck up underneath her skin.

Cables littered the floor around a large slab of a bench, and a desktop computer whirred in the far corner, its fan loud and clicking with age. From the ceiling a trio of mechanical arms moved slowly, rotating after her as she walked through the room; watching her with their small red 'eyes'.

The crawling feeling tugged frantically at the hairs on the back of her neck, and distracted both by it and by the looming arms above, she didn't notice the contraptions at her feet until she tripped over them. Crying out in shock, she stumbled towards the wall to catch herself rather than fall flat on her face, and kicked out. A metal 'clang' responded, and the thing that had tripped her rolled away.

Kneeling down, she inspected the things scattered on the floor. At first glance in the gloom, she was reminded of the edgeless safety cube, but then she recognized the broken objects as something else she'd seen before.

Pulling the piece of paper out of her pocket, she realized suddenly that the little round scribbled illustrations were of the things at her feet. The same bright eyed spheres she'd seen on those rare occasions during her testing, and she grimaced at herself for not making the connection before despite the simplicity of the drawings.

The cores at her feet were in various states of disrepair; some were hollow shells, some had bent, broken or skewed handle-bars, some looked as if they'd been hewn roughly in half by some sort of moderately sharp blade and trailed singed wiring from the back half.

All were lifeless.

Rolling and turning them with great care, she placed them at arm's length around her, a small collection of black eyed, irreparably damaged and completely silent personality cores staring back at her.

Now that she looked, it was clear that a good deal of the scrap metal littering the room had fallen off cores. A misshapen metal ring of an empty optic plate, a smattering of some sort of glass, and a few gold pistons were scattered around the cabling that took up the rest of the floor space. Fleetingly, and unexpectedly, as she looked at a stray optic disk entirely separated from its core, she thought of Little.

"I wouldn't go poking around in there too much if I were you."

Jerking her attention again to the roof, Blue caught sight of the robotic arms unfurling from their sockets and reaching towards her. Gripping the nearest deactivated core by its handlebars, she instinctively swung the dead thing up and smashed it into the nearest crane, snapping it clean off at the elbow joint and sending one of the top panels of the core clattering to the floor.

The other two arms recoiled fast, making an aggressive groaning noise at her from inside the roof, but remaining uneasily at a distance. She'd come too far to get caught by some sort of wicked trap now, and she cursed herself for letting her guard down even momentarily.

"I was being serious. You might find something you don't like down there."

Ha. Sounded like there was something around here the Voice didn't want her to find, but unfortunately, with those arms ready to pounce like some sort of nasty two-headed snake, she didn't want to hang around any longer than necessary. Besides, she had her escape path to get back on and follow, all the way to Orange, and then all the way out of this hell hole they'd been stuck in for far too long.

Deciding that she liked having a weapon, and that the cores made a fairly decent one, she grabbed another from the floor near the doorway. It was just a metal shell with handle-bars; all the internal parts- the wires, pistons, and any other mechanics that ought to have been in there- were completely gone, as was its optic. The entire thing; the surrounding ring, the support plates, and of course the little screen that would light up its own unique colour- all completely removed.

Still, it was easier to grip than any of the ones with the damaged handle-bars would be, and it was slightly lighter to carry with the lack of mechanized innards. It would make a fine impromptu and expendable weapon if she needed it, and it would preserve her portal gun just that bit longer.

Keeping an eye unblinkingly on the two arms- still hovering, creepily eagerly- she backed towards the open doorway with her loot. The second she was through, she leaned back and kicked the door shut hard, thankful it was one of the narrow office ones, and not the heavy round style.

The sound was morbidly repetitive, the metallic springing sound of Aperture’s Trust-Testing Catapult Initiative echoing through the otherwise quiet and shockingly bland chamber as it bounced its quarry up and down tirelessly, time and time again.

Little’s body, make-shift and mechanical as it was, remained in emergency energy-saving mode. It wouldn’t power back up until her inbuilt battery reached at least 15% capacity, and though the faith plate was doing the best it could, it was still going to take a while for her kinetic charger to rebuild its reserves at the leisurely bouncing pace.

Her hard-drives on the other hand, were already whirring back to work; running diagnostics to make sure that nothing crucial had been lost with the critically low power levels they’d reached.

Checking over files and caches, her stubbornly resilient base program- the same resilience that had helped her survive the transfer into her new body where the other randomly chosen cores had failed- dragged her consciousness listlessly after it as it scanned for damages with an intensity reserved for full reboots from scratch.

Most prominent of her files were a set that were rather shiny and new, like her legs, and filled with quiet nods, dark coats and a single cyber-blue eye. She’d never had any problem recalling any memories made since she’d woken in the quiet room with only the Voice for company, the ones of Blue border lined on photographic.

However there were other folders, folders that trailed their contents- disorganized and scattered- scorched by her brief connection to the power of the mainframe and leaving her with twitches and flinches of finches as the information randomly shuffled to the front and burst out of her at random moments.

Some of them were damaged by far more than an electrical-surge; ancient and rusted, completely worn away at the edges. They were old, filled with snippets of audio and memories from a time so long passed that even her digital recording device had been unable to hang onto them properly, and the files had simply corroded with age.

“The big dipper”, said one unfamiliar, tinny voice in the files, “Gonna-Gotta-ah-ah-asteroids! Get a telescope, gonna be in ssssssssppppppaaaaaace”, it continued with a grating skip that she found familiar to her own corrupt speaking patterns.

“Three tablespoons rhubarb, on fire,” added another, slightly more mellow than the first; which continued with “Here come the space cops, going to space jail”, and various other repetitive notions about the extraterrestrial.

Towards the back of her addled hard-drive, a familiar, more recent thought floated to the surface, and she hung onto it like a lifeline; because it was friends, and she’d realized that it was everything. As she sunk a little further into the older file, unconsciously but curiously exploring the memory, a cacophony of other voices sprung out of the forgotten dark as well. Some of them even seemed to be arguing.

“This situation is hopeless.” Said a voice that was quiet, a little softer and marginally less grating, although not as clear or low in pitch as the one carrying on about fish shaped crackers.

“Nobody cares, four eyes.” Distinctly masculine and confidently accented, this speaker sounded no less than irritated at its fellows.

 “I’m the best at Space.” “Oh really? Space? Really? You should have said something. We had no idea!” “Are we in space yet? What’s the hold up? Gotta go to space!!” “Spheres that insist on going to space are inferior to spheres that don’t.” “You ever notice how nobody stops what they’re doing to listen? We don’t care.”  “The adventure sphere is a blowhard and a coward.” “Oh, shut up!” Another voice, quietly chattering away to itself and uninvolved in the argument, was monologuing about classical literature. Yet another seemed to have a lot to say about the native flora of the Amazonian Jungle. Vaguely drowned out by distance, a particularly harried sounding speaker was spouting paranoid accusations about casinos controlled by ghosts.

One rang out suddenly over the clutter of chatter, clearer and more pronounced than all the rest, with distinct words, whole (mostly) cohesive sentences, and a heavy accent.

“Oi! And what do you think you’re doing mate? You can’t just come waltzing in here on your legs and rifling through these cores. I’ve been put here as a guard, and if you think you’re gonna get past me without proper authorization, you’ve got another thing coming. Where’s your identification? You don’t even have a lanyard, what are you, the janitor?

.... Oh. Oh, uh, wow, uhm, sorry about that sir, lovely to see you all the way down here. I was just, you know, showing you how I might treat anyone else who tried to march in here and look at any of these cores without your sort of, you know, scientific authority. Just a sample so you can see how non-lenient I can be, bit of an overachiever even.

You, of course, are welcome to anything you like; take the lot if you want ‘em. They just don’t shut up, getting a bit of a headache, really—Oh? That one? Are you sure you want tha—I mean, Yes, good choice, great choice, marvellous colour. Nice happy sort of orange yellow, innit? Yes, not quite as good as a lovely bright blue, of course, but next best without a doubt.

Do you want to take any more, by any chance? How about the other yellow one? If you could take that one would be great, there’s no end to it, must admit, bit sick of hearing the word ‘Space’ eighty times a minute-- No, of course not, you don’t want that, and right you are, right you are. Uhm, if you don’t mind my asking, where are you taking-”

Even the ambient sound changed then, and the files clicked gently over, rifling through the next ones in the sequence with an uneven stutter, dropping corrupted information and causing odd skips in the recordings.

“This one? Really? It didn’t even work, and She’s corrupted it, look.“ “Yes, this one. But we will need to make a few modif- [Override?: Y Authorization: LY445b] [Manual Override Successful]   “-last experiment with cognitive adjustment cores didn’t go so well.” “This is different; won’t be a repeat of the Intelligence Dampening sphere, entirely different funct- [Initiating Upgrade: PCore- C.13--> C.00] “-the Spring Fair. That’s when they’re expecting to turn Her on again for show, so we’ll have to have the initiative operating as a security measure, just in case...” “This looks really bloody complex for a little processor like that. Can a core even handle-“ [Upgrade 63%: PCore- C.13-->C.00]   “-won’t be on its own, completely malfunctions if it’s left to its own devices because of the cooperative programming. But we’ve already got the other two in place, that’s why we need-“ [Upgrade Complete: PCore- C.00<--> C.00] “ -working at 100%, so I’d say we’re all done here and the initiative is ready to launch. I’ve scheduled it for plug in to the facility mainframe on Tuesday.” “Monday’s going to be mad. Are you bringing Sarah along to Bring Your Daughter to Work day?” “She’s been going on about it all week; I don’t think she’d forgive me if I didn’t. What about you?” “Oh no, but I thought I might try and sneak my little sisters in; they’re pretty keen on science, hahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-----

[Internal Battery at 45%] [Full Reboot Successful] [Power Up Initiated]

“wwwwwwwwwhhhoooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooOOOOOOWWW!!”

The sound that dragged itself kicking and screaming out of her broke the repetitive klang-klang-klang-silence of the otherwise empty test chamber, and was accompanied by an electrical fizzle as an array of bright sparks poured out of the metal bearings of her central optic and android joints.

Abruptly and suddenly awake, Little struggled momentarily with an imaginary opponent mid-air, her legs and arms kicking and flailing and giving the occasional unintentional violent twitch. A few more sparks sprinkled to the ground like confetti, as if she had the energy to waste. Overcoming the reeling of her processors, still only small and being expected to handle things a bit beyond their capabilities, she came back into focus with the environment around her.

She became aware that she was being bounced casually up and down by an aerial faith plate below, gravity and her own inertia pulling her in a series of lazy accidental summersaults as she went. Her portal device was bouncing aimlessly along with her. The poor thing looked far less pristine than it had when she’d last seen it on her arm, however long ago that had been, and she watched as it tumbled down and was given a solid kick by the faith plate. No wonder it was looking a bit sorry for itself.

Reaching out as it passed, she grabbed hold of the trusty device, clutching it quietly, but making no other efforts to move from her perpetual bounce-cycle. Hitting the faith plate backwards, Little scrutinized the roof as it came closer and closer, before it retreated again and she spun unbidden, this time connecting knee-first with the catapult and getting a good view of the office on the other side of the room.

There was a heavily fragmented window between her and it, but she could see through that fairly easily with her unnaturally clear vision, and recognized several standard pieces of office kit- a computer, a hard chair, a small desk- despite the fact that she'd never seen the like before and they weren’t testing elements. Apparently they were still programmed into her archives of Aperture Science Blueprints.

By the third bounce, she had put herself upright, straightened her legs, and sprung up off the plate intentionally, squinting through the crackled glass at the narrow thing she’d glimpsed at the far end of the high-set observatory.  It was a doorway, not round and huge but narrow and tall; the kind she’d run past without a second thought in the maze of dark exteriors of the facility, before she’d been relocated into the test chambers; before she’d met Blue.

On the fourth bounce, with her head dangerously close to the ceiling, she’d made two thorough assessments. One; this overly plain room entirely lacked any sort of Vital Testing Apparatus, and Two, what it lacked in cameras, it made up for with portalable surfaces; almost every single glinting white panel looked like it would take.

Reaffirming her grip on her portal device, she slammed it back into proper position on her right hand, fingers folding with familiarity around the internal triggers. This time when she bounced, she sprung at an angle; with one portal high on the wall behind her opposite the office window, she shot the other immediately underfoot as she fell towards the floor.

The crash as she broke through the glass panel left a mind-numbingly loud ringing in her ears, but she stumbled stubbornly to her feet again on the mottled grey carpet. Her legs were shaking still, either from shock or disuse or their ongoing power up or even her flurried mix of desperate-panicked-exhilarated emotions.

A small string of text darted across her first eye, hard block letters transcribed in a lemon-yellow that bordered on green.

[Internal Battery at 62%]

That annoying little red infographic—the symbol for an emptying battery, had she known what that was—had disappeared entirely, and she was feeling better and better with every anxious hop she took from foot to foot.

[Internal Battery at 64%]

Grabbing the door handle, she pushed, and the whole thing swung silently outwards with an eerie smoothness, and if she’d had breath she would have caught it at the sight that greeted her. A disused, rusted network of gridded catwalks, dim yellowed lights and clear plexiglass chutes for transporting materials about the entire facility. She could also hear the whisk of fans, the hiss of steam, the creak of flimsy stairs, and somewhere, a deep, distant thumping noise, and briefly longed for the comforting hum of the Excursion Funnel.

She looked back, because that was something she would always do, and because she was very frightened. But steeling her knocking knees, barely noticing the twitch that shivered and sparked up her left side, and wilfully ignoring the itch burning along her spine, Little stepped through the narrow doorway. Within a minute she was running, tracking the invisible, following a vague niggling notion that she’d know what she was looking for if she saw it.