Chapter 19: Gears and Bones

A memory… an uncomfortable one, but only a memory. It wasn’t anything Chell had to worry herself about. When she opened her eyes, the remnants of the memory would be gone and she would never think about it again. She opened her eyes, for the first time, hoping… begging for the blood red light to shine on her and to bring her back into the present.

There was no light. She felt the air beneath her. There was no… floor? There was nothing. Chell was in freefall, heading to the ground like a baby bird from its nest. She had the urge to scream, but knew it wouldn’t do her any good. There was no end in sight, a lot like the corridor. She was still alone.

It was darkness all around, as if she had fallen out of a plane in the dead of night. And yet, she could swear she saw something in the distance… yes… a little girl. Her younger self, hobbling along as if she had ground to walk on. Chell reached out to her, almost able to touch her baggy sweater.

No matter how far she reached out, though, she was always just out of reach. Little Chell was heading towards the sliding doors of the old Aperture reception area, where even respectable employees like Dad still had to pass through. Why was she seeing this? Was she still… dreaming?

If she could, Chell wondered, would she stop herself from going in? She had so little idea of what awaited her… it wasn’t something she could have understood. They broke her in ways she couldn’t have imagined. They made her live her credo. Even now though… the other choice didn’t seem much of a choice at all. It was to live as a shell of a person, never committing to what she could be. Would she have been happier? Maybe… but she wouldn’t have been her.

It hurt watching her go in, giving up a much quieter, less hectic life. But it was the right choice. It was what she had to do.

…

After a few minutes, the dreary image began to shift.  It was as if she were floating under a planetarium, the scenery around her changing in her descent. The stormy greys on the inside and outside of the old Aperture facility gradually peeled away, making way for a powerful electric blue that spread all over.

Suddenly, she wasn’t falling anymore. She certainly hadn’t landed - she would’ve felt that, long fall boots or not. The picture in front of her was one of an unfinished test chamber. A faith plate, a turret and a switch were lined up, facing her, none of them activated. Even the red light in the turret’s eye was out.

This didn’t make any sense. Nothing did. Waking up from a dream into an unending pit. Seeing her younger self do things she’d already done. Remembering events in an unnaturally specific fashion. Landing in a test chamber in the middle of a lab dedicated to getting her out of them? How was any of this supposed to help?

And top of it all, the electric blue was almost… suspiciously blue. The room was blue, the lights were blue, the objects were blue. It seemed to be some kind of tint. She reasoned she would be able to walk forward, having broken her fall somehow. Chell tried moving her legs, only to realize she couldn’t… feel them. She reached forward, her arms still responding, and her hands rippled the tint like a fishing pole through water. And then… she actually looked at her hands. This time, she actually did scream - she had shed her skin. Her arms were pure bone.

Her joints creaked as she craned her neck left and right. Her limbs were sticks, hard as the branches of an oak. Her torso was a thin row of curves and ridges that connected her top to bottom. She ran her hands over her skull, tough but smooth as a marble floor. Chell was a skeleton.

She felt her breath escalating by itself, in and out. She had to control it. She tried to focus - to build a barrier between herself and these feelings. She tried shutting the door on them, waiting for them to tire and leave. They went nowhere. Chell was hyperventilating, suspended in a space she didn’t understand.

She was used to being confused. Circling around the confusion, though, was a much less familiar feeling. It was a longing for something else - a refusal to cope with what was in front of her. In fact, there was some recognition that something was missing. She searched tirelessly in herself for what that was, but try as she might, it wouldn’t turn up unless something changed.

Almost as if some entity had been taking pleasure in her frantic shifting and panting, the blue tint sunk away as if on cue. It took the form of a lightfield, opening upwards like a garage door. Chell’s skin reappeared right in front of her eyes, crawling out of her bones like a massive parasite and falling into place like a well-tailored dress. This was all below a slick orange jumpsuit which was either several sizes too small, or intentionally zipping her into a slimmer figure. There would certainly be no slack with which to tie its sleeves gently around her waist...

She could feel her legs again - a coil of light made itself visible and unshackled them. Chell was nudged out of the little booth she realized the light field had entrapped her in. She fell onto her knees which she had done a considerable amount as of late. The pain started there, down her legs, but seemingly took refuge inside the other feelings that were hurting her. It scrambled up her body and into her chest until the tightness of the jumpsuit, firm as it was, knocked her prostrate onto the floor. 

A voice cackled in the distance. Who else?

“You’re back.” GLaDOS said, her words ringing all around. There was always a feeling that she was right in the room with you, but this time, she felt particularly present.

Chell wasn’t ready for this. She tried to pick herself up, praying that it would all disappear - praying for this nightmare to end. The suit practically had her in a bearhug, and it brought her down to the ground again.

“I told you I would resurrect the dead one day.” GLaDOS proclaimed proudly.” You didn’t believe me did you?”

A rumbling could be heard in the distance, as if a building were being demolished.. It seemed to draw closer and closer, following GLaDOS’ voice.

“I wanted to tell you how many years had passed, but this project took so long… I lost count of all the zeroes.”

Chell finally stood up, clutching her stomach in pain. She hobbled over to the objects scattered around the test chamber. Maybe she just had to solve it. Yes - it was just another obstacle she had to overcome. She had done it before and she would do it again. 

“You’re lucky I had so many corpses to work with.” GLaDOS’ voice was getting even louder, the building demolition growing to the scale of an entire neighborhood.. “Even so, I was going through them at an alarming rate. Some of them disintegrated, others dissolved… some just seemed to disappear. I was so worried I would get to yours without any good data. What on Earth would I do without you? You monster.” 

The noise was intensifying by the second, and so was GLaDOS. Chell just had to solve this puzzle. She had to get out of this chamber. Everything would be fine if she could just figure this out. There was a not illogical thought looming at the back of her mind - that this situation had nothing to do with whether or not she could solve a stupid puzzle - but Chell couldn’t consider it seriously. She wasn’t capable of it. She was wracked with a bitter determination.

“I never told you this.” GLaDOS’ voice had conquered the persistent ringing that exists in every room, as massive walls tipped over like dominos, “But I was scared of you. I was scared of how strong you were… with him by your side. You were getting so close to beating me - to putting me down again. I couldn’t let it happen.”

Chell looked about frantically, knowing somewhere deep down that her time was quite limited. Colorful lines of light and flashing arrows connected the turret and the faith plate and the switch to one another. She needed something to click. She needed that eureka moment that drove her from place to place.

“If I know anything, it’s people. I won’t pretend I understand humans, but I know how to break them.” GLaDOS said, her voice deafening but somehow still not quite physically with Chell, “You were a tough nut to crack, I will admit. But I figured it out. I took a calculated risk and sent you down to that… place. There are immensely powerful machines… and ideas down there. In the scope of my existence, it was the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, I felt eternities going by, fretting that you would figure it out. Fretting that you would come back stronger, and with him still by your side.”

Chell flicked the switch out of desperation, and to her shock, a certain squeaky voice peeped out from below:

“Target acquired.”

A series of bullets lodged themselves in her chest and she fell over again, bringing the turret down with her. A familiar blood red shrouded her sight, molding into a cloud which gradually filled itself in. Chell could feel that refusal looming inside her, conspiring to take control. It would give up the second it did - she knew it would. She couldn’t let it in.

“Imagine,” GLaDOS said with delight, “Imagine my relief when you did emerge from that dark dungeon - when you emerged the same as before, but without that little insect on your waist. It was like I had been restocked with neurotoxin, and a brand new batch of scientists had placed their unshakable faith in me. It was something I hadn’t felt in a long time.”

Yet again, Chell dragged herself to her feet. GLaDOS wasn’t making sense, but she could only interpret this in a way that kept herself consistent. It just proved this wasn’t real. The bullets weren’t real. These feelings weren’t real. She just had to keep going. When the turret had finished its little seizure, she squeezed it against herself in some desperate triumph.  She… didn’t know why she did it, but she absolutely needed to. It gave her an energy to persist.

“It was strange to me how easily you got back to it. It was like you never knew him. One minute you wanted to escape, and the next, you were satisfied with spending your life with me, testing to your heart’s content. And you did, of course. You tested until nothing was new anymore. You tested until you could only hear my voice, even when I wasn’t speaking. You tested until your body wouldn’t let you. It was like you forgot who you were - how strong you were. Honestly, that’s part of the reason I brought you back. I wanted to know… why? What happened down in that dungeon? I knew it would best you, one way or another. But I am curious: What did you do to your friend?”

The booming noise was just outside. Clutching the turret close to her chest, Chell took a deep breath and stepped onto the faith plate. The little things really lived up to their name. There were times where you truly couldn’t see where you would land. She wouldn’t admit it, but she had a fundamental trust in these machines that she would never put in something breathing. It took a moment, as if the device itself weren't ready. Like it always had though, the faith plate catapulted her through a hole in the wall, so high that it stood out of sight from where she had been standing.

She landed on the other platform like an acrobat, planting her feet down on the ground. The test chamber looked quite large moments ago, but Chell had only seen the half of it. The platform stuck out of the wall in an otherwise barren room. A sizable red button, a characteristically Aperture-ish unsubtle design, stuck out of the ground. A stream of arrows, lit up and shining brightly, crawled up the wall to nowhere in particular.

“You don’t want to tell me,” GLaDOS’ monotone rang in Chell’s ears, “And it intrigues me to no end. Did you lose him? Did you forget him? Did you… ha. Yes, I think you did. I see something in you… I always have. I used to hate how you would just prance from chamber to chamber without a care in the world. But… I’ve grown to love it. I haven’t seen it in any other subject - any other person. That complete disregard for everything… anyone else. It reminds me of someone.”

Chell placed herself on the big red button, prompting a swirly excursion tunnel to start out from the wall. The tunnel led upwards diagonally, over towards another button that was connected to the exit. She… stopped for a moment.

“Is something wrong?” GLaDOS asked, the terrible noise having reached the wall to this particular chamber.

Chell looked at the button before her and then the button she was supposed to be funnelled to. She stepped off for a moment, and the whole setup disappeared. The tunnel flickered off, the third platform sunk back into the wall and the exit blocked itself off. She stepped back on, and it all reappeared. The realization slowly dawned on her - she wouldn’t be able to get to the next button.

“Maybe I can help.” GLaDOS said mischievously.

Chell felt a powerful rumbling all around. The walls surrounding her came crashing down, breaking into little bits of rubble. The hum of the facility became quiet, as mournful sirens sounded off helplessly in the distance. Pieces and scrap and junk of all sorts piled into the chamber, growing until it submerged the very platform Chell was standing on, stopping just short of her ankles.

Emerging from the dust was a gargantuan rectangular base, the size of a mansion. A massive mechanical arm supported and manipulated it, stretching back through the chamber further than the eye could see. At the center of it all was a cunning sphere of bright light, twice as big as Chell. It was brighter than the sun on a scorching summer day, burning her eyes like an eclipse.

GLaDOS giggled as she cast her massive shadow over Chell, like a shoe looming over an ant.

“What’s the matter? Did you think I was just going to stay the same for a hundred thousand years?” GLaDOS laughed. “No, of course not. I changed. I changed while you were busy staying exactly the same, your bones rotting away.”

Chell grabbed her stomach, the jumpsuit squeezing her breathless.

“Go on,” GLaDOS whispered, “Solve the puzzle.”

Chell gasped for air, GLaDOS’ massive body hanging over. She darted her eyes across and around the platform, confidence rapidly waning in herself. Try as she might, there would be no eureka moment. There would be no magical fix. Oxygen ceased to flow to her lungs, and blood red light seemed to peer out from inside her eyes.  In a last ditch attempt to save herself, she cast the sleeping turret into the excursion tunnel. Leisurely, it floated its way to the button, hardly making a sound when it fell from its ride. The turret bounced off of course, too light to even budge the button.

“That,” GLaDOS boomed, “Was the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. I really have stacked the deck against you this time,” she curled what was left of the panels on the walls in an arrogant flex, sending a powerful wave of air across the facility “But when has that ever stopped you? I’m beginning to think you’re not what you were…”

Squarely in the middle of GLaDOS’ giant shadow, Chell could see something… she could see a much smaller, darker shape in the middle of it all. It wasn’t particularly noticeable but it didn’t seem to have a source. 

“Or maybe…” GLaDOS suggested, almost excitedly, “You’re exactly what I always thought you were.”

The shape seemed to widen, slowly but surely devouring the rest of the shadow and spitting it out in pure pitch black. 

“Yes… I know exactly who you are. I didn’t bring you back to watch you squirm in a world that outgrew you.” A massive hook swung out from the shattered ceiling, which revealed an even higher one above.  “I brought you back to merge your will with this place… I brought you back to make you whole.”

The hook could’ve skewered Chell like a pea off a plate, but it didn’t. It produced smaller and smaller versions of itself until it finally reached her, breathless and humiliated. It made the difference in scale all the more evident. The hook lifted her up into the air like a coat hanging in a closet.

“It’s difficult to do everything on your own. I’ve had thousands of years to learn that… but now, we don’t have to anymore. We’ll watch over this place together. ”

Chell squirmed helplessly. She punched the air like a little toddler, draining the limited breath she had left.  As she ascended further and further into the air, she could feel herself descending further and further into the eye of the enormous shadow. It comprised an entirely different shape altogether, abstract - not rectangular. These were her thoughts as GLaDOS dragged her into a new life…

“You’ll be perfect for this,” GLaDOS said, “Embrace the feeling!”