BOY DO I LOVE SWEATING: 3.

And I hope I'll be ready
When my light, when my life divides.
- "A Thousand Years" Azure Ray

As the day wears on, they find an abandoned farmhouse off the road, next to a river.

All the blood seems to go right out of her when they first spot the mailbox at the end of a rocky driveway. "Are you all right? Are you going to faint?" Wheatley asks her. "Because honestly, you'd be out of luck, I wouldn't know what to do with that." She purses her lips at him, looks back at the mailbox, swallows, blinks hard, and marches up the driveway. He trails behind and looks in the mailbox (it's empty), wary of meeting strange humans. She won't even be able to handle the talking, so he reluctantly rehearses an opening line in his head: "Hello. Wee are some hyoomans." Got to enunciate.

Once they round the trees and see the dilapidated state of the farmhouse, it's clear there is no danger of running into anyone here. The original two or three stories are slumped into one ground-floor mess, appearing to have been pulled down by a gigantic wraparound balcony. (He can discern all this thanks to his latest discovery: squinting, it turns out, is the quick cure to myopia.) Behind the farmhouse is a flaky red barn, which appears even older but partially intact.

The dappled shade under the trees is a relief after hours of asphalt in the burning sun. She picks her way around the debris of the house, looking under the heaps of faded white planks, as he futzes with the lock on the door of what he assumes is a cellar and tries not to smell himself. When he looks up again, she's posed perfectly still atop the remains of a collapsed brick wall, her head cocked, listening.

"What do you hear? Something bad? I can't…" He strains his own ears but can only pick up an indistinct rustling, a sound produced by 99% of all outdoor things, somewhere nearby. She leaps down and sets off through the trees toward the source of the sound.

Wheatley is fed up with walking. He's seen the soles of his feet and they are not pretty, especially the part that got cut by broken glass back in his lair. He dawdles by the cellar for a second, but ultimately the growing anxiety of being separated from her, adrift and squinty in the wilderness, wins out over his various pains and fatigues. He follows in the direction she went. Among the trees, the ground is completely covered with a layer of soft, rotting old leaves, the most pleasing surface he's walked on so far.

A minute later he finds her standing on the steep bank of a river, halfway undressed. Hearing him approach, she turns around and gives him another eyebrow raise, standing on one foot and pulling off the second leg of her untied jumpsuit. Underneath it she's wearing a pair of tightly-fitted blue shorts pulled up over the bottom of her sleeveless shirt.

"Ohhh! You're going to wash, aren't you? And that'll get rid of the smell! Brilliant. Oh, I should as well!"

She heaves the cube up into her arms and takes a running leap into the river, sending up a colossal, sparkling splash. As he unzips his own jumpsuit eagerly, he hears again the quiet rasping that is her laughter. Her voice is quite low for a woman's, he thinks, inasmuch as she has a voice, and if that laugh is even anything to go by. The clothing under his jumpsuit is slightly different from hers – an untucked Aperture Science t-shirt and black shorts. He's under the impression that washing is usually a naked thing, but she's left this layer on, so he does too.

The sound of her drinking the water in slurps, then coughing, rises over the bank. Probably not the cleanest water ever, but hydration is hydration. He should give it a try.

He edges down the muddy slope to where the cube sits in the shallowest part, diverting the stream in little eddies around it, but he stops short of dipping in his feet. "Listen," he calls. She pulls the tie from her hair, up to her chin in water. "What are the chances I'm going to fry in this river? Does this body contain any electronic components?"

She meets his eyes and shrugs.

"You don't— how can you not know? You're the one who did this!"

An emphatic shake of the head this time before she takes a deep breath and plunges her head into the water.

"No? What does that mean? You didn't do this? No electronic components? …Oh, for god's sake, you're impossible," he mutters and stomps one foot into the water, damning the consequences. Nothing happens except that the water is the coldest substance he's ever encountered… and it feels bloody amazing. He stumbles forward into it and quickly submerges up to his chest, emitting a series of inarticulate hoots at the temperature. His toes sink into the sandy bed as the river swirls around him, trying to tug him over. The sensation is like being sucked into the pneumatic tube, or space, except fun instead of terrifying.

"I'm going to try drinking now. And this is a first, so keep an eye on me, would you?"

He exhales resolutely, lowers his mouth to the water and sucks in a long draft. It's not too bad – in fact, one might say it is also bloody amazing – but why does being a human have to involve so much wetness, anyway? Nary a moment has passed that he wasn't expelling fluid of one sort or another, and now he has to refuel. It's like the body has only one problem and only one solution and they're both water.

That thought looms like a craggy abyss in his mind, the endless upkeep cycle of biological life, but he pushes away from it and concentrates on the amusing novelty that is swallowing.

As he drinks, she wades over to the cube, sits down in the shallows beside it, and begins to scrub off its layers of filth with the heel of one hand. She looks like a bedraggled cat. Her hair sticks to her neck in wet clumps.

"You're cleaning that thing?" She flashes him her prissiest look yet. "Okay, but it's not the one that smells. Let's concentrate on the glandular beings first, shall we? Do we just sort of…" Uncertainly, he splashes water over his scalp and face, then runs his hands over his bare arms, examining the clutter of freckles spread over them and the short, wiry, colorless hair. "You have to show me how to do this, love, 'cause I'm lost."

Another shrug. She grabs a handful of sand from the riverbed and grinds it against the cube.

"Well, that looks painful. I think you're meant to use soap. But… no soap, so let's try it." He picks through his own handful of sand to make sure there's no sharp bits before smearing it across one arm. "Huh! Exfoliating. Augh," he murmurs in pleasure, pushing up the sleeve of his t-shirt and scrubbing the sand over his shoulders. "You can add 'exfoliating' to the good list. It's like getting a full exterior detailing, this." She watches him with that funny shy smile while she cleans the cube; coils of ash float away downstream as the pink hearts on its surface grow brighter and brighter.

Before long he's sanded down and rinsed all the exposed parts of himself. It still feels grimy under the waistband of his shorts.

"Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this easier if you take off all your clothes?"

Just like that, she's on her again feet with a brisk sloshing sound. She hikes back up the bank, using the cube as a step, and vanishes over the side.

"Wait! Where are you—?"

She reappears over the side, looking aggravated, and plucks out the hem of her shirt, holding it away from her body. She flicks her wrist at him dismissively and is gone. Lost, he looks down and clutches the hem of his own shirt. Oh! "Okay, I'll stay here!" he yells to her, peeling the shirt off and draping it over the cube, followed by the shorts. "Do whatever you need to. Just stick around, will you? Don't want to leave your cube to get washed away!"

A few minutes later, Wheatley is sparkling clean all over. With the possible exception of the one bizarre crotch appendage, because when he tries to attack that bit with sand – well, that's a world of pain best not revisited. Struggling to pull the clingy wet clothes back on, he hesitates in front of the cube. Three of its six faces are still dirty.

It's patently ridiculous that either of them is bothering to bring it along, let alone coddle it like a child. They are outside now. No more testing. Why should she maintain a bond with a test object when she's got a perfectly good member of her own species to jerk around?

Well, that one is easy. He's not a perfectly good member of her own species.

She still hasn't returned from wherever she went, so he grabs another handful of sand and sets to cleaning the rest of the thing. Not all of the scorch marks come off, and there's nothing to be done about the bullet holes and various other pockmarks, but he manages to get it decently shiny. Smirking to himself in satisfaction, he clambers up the bank and stands dripping on the grass. She's right there, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree a few yards away, facing away from him with her head thrown back to watch the shifting leaves above. "I'm done," he announces. "What are you doing? Have you been here the whole time?"

She jumps up, pinches the side of his sleeve between her fingers, and pulls him to the fallen tree, where she yanks him down into a seated position.

"Is it inconceivable you might show me what to do with a little less force?" he growls, jerking away from her hands. "I can manage myself, I'm a robot, not a m— well, was a robot, I guess. Hopefully will be a proper robot again someday. But that's beside the point. While you've been sat here daydreaming, I only just finished scouring your cube to gleaming perfection. Out of the kindness of my heart, you know. Could do with some respect."

Sighing through her nose, she fixes him with a brief irritated look that gives way to ruefulness. She jabs a finger at him, then backs away slowly, palms up, circling around to the river.

"I get it. Stay here. See, there's absolutely no need to be violent!"

He tries sitting with his legs arranged in different configurations on the tree trunk, picking at the bark with his fingernails and listening to her splash around.

Why this business about taking turns in the river, though? Is it because he was naked? Come to think of it, that jogs up a memory from his early days at Aperture, a memory of contention among the scientists over the complicated human norms regarding appropriate work dress. While he never bothered to get the hang of it all, he's proud to find he did retain a single basic tenet: when in doubt, put on more clothes, never less. And don't go naked. Nobody wants to see their friends naked, and if somebody does want that, they'd best keep it to themselves. The two of them are… not quite enemies anymore, sort of companions, so something like friends, so nakedness is inappropriate, and she's… she's probably naked right now, isn't she.

That's a weirdly interesting thought.

He's halfway turned around, craning his neck up to see if that's the case, when he thinks better of it. If she has gone to all this trouble to make sure they don't glimpse each other naked, ruining it will surely lead to her hitting him in some new, creative way. Besides, it's a privacy thing, isn't it? She always averted her eyes while he performed his hacking maneuvers, so now he will avert his eyes while she's… naked.

Because she's naked.

When she finally comes up behind him, wringing out her hair and no longer naked, Wheatley has discovered a whole new range of nervous tics, including chewing on his nails, jiggling his leg, clacking his teeth together, pinching the tip of his nose, and popping his knuckles. "Great. We done?" he says as she gathers her jumpsuit up. "I think we should go back round to the house and take another look. Because there's sure to be stuff, human stuff, that you might need. I realize you've probably worked that much out for yourself, so… back to the house. Unless there's something else we need to do here. And I mean it could be something completely obvious, something that I'm just not seeing, as that seems to happen a lot, I'm still not used to this—this— well, you know, all this, haha. Arrgh! Everything. So just, you know, sound the alarm if there's something else." She stares at him. "No? Nothing? Okay, let's go."

By the time they reach the homestead, their underclothes are mostly dry. She pulls her jumpsuit on halfway and ties it at the waist again; he imitates her, fumbling with the arms until they are tangled in something resembling a loose square knot. He's always believed his knowledge of knots to be quite comprehensive, but apparently tying them is another matter. The whole thing sags and falls off the moment he takes a step, so she redoes it for him in one swift motion as he looks up at the barn, burning with some kind of embarrassment.

She resumes her hunt through the farmhouse debris with admirable single-mindedness, leaving no plank unturned. Wheatley stands watching her, aware of his limbs dangling uselessly, before returning to the cellar door and giving it his full attention. It is padlocked shut. As he turns the lock over, big flakes of rust come away under his fingers. Frowning, he rattles it.

There is something behind this door, possibly even something good, and he cannot resist the challenge. Let the hack begin.

He considers the rusted lock, its integrity compromised: a vulnerability. Using his fingers, he rakes away at it, but human appendages are no match for even a rusted lock. He pulls on it with all his might, but the shackle remains stubbornly intact. He could try biting it, but putting his mouth on foreign objects seems like barking up the wrong tree. This leaves only one other option: sheer cleverness. And brute force. The two combined. In other words, tools!

He seizes a large jagged rock from the driveway, raises it over his head, swallows, and delivers a single devastating blow to the lock. It cracks open immediately.

Bing! Payload. "Hah!" he shouts at the top of his lungs, giddy with success. There is a crashing sound from across the mass of rubble as she jolts up in surprise, dropping the armful of planks she was looking under. "Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to scare you. But look! Just hacked this cellar door open! Come on, come have a look!"

Before she does, she fishes one hand under the fallen planks and draws out a white thing, holding it over her head with a triumphant smile. He squints. It's a dirty old t-shirt wrapped around a big, heavy-looking unlabeled can.

"Oh! What's that you've found? Go team! Progress all the time!"

She sets her prizes down on the concrete walk in front of the cellar, picks up the rock he just used, and bashes open the can without prelude. Immediately a sick stench rises from the innards of the mangled tin, stinging his nostrils and eyes. "Ugh! No! What is that? How is that useful?"

Looking revolted and furious, she hurls the can away into the grass. An arc of pale, rancid slop spills from it midair.

"Well, glad to see you're not planning to eat it, then. Let's hope my thing pans out a bit nicer." She's already disappearing down the steps into the shadowy cellar. He follows.

The interior is all cool mottled stone and wood shelves, he sees, illuminated by grainy shafts of sunlight from the hacked doorway. A few lone glass jars, most of them filled with a red substance, stand and lie in disarray on the shelves and floor. She grabs one of the red ones and unscrews it, sniffing, and her face is suddenly aglow. He catches a whiff: a sweet, mellow smell. Unspoiled food.

Wheatley's stomach clenches.

She plucks out a tiny round fruit and pops it into her mouth, chewing beatifically. She offers the jar to him. He finds himself backing away, hands raised, fingertips crossed in a shield. The crushing motion of her jaw pauses as her eyebrows go up.

"I— I really would rather not. At this stage."

Water is one thing, when you've been walking in the sun. Water doesn't take mastication, and there is only one kind of water. But food. Food is the most human thing, and here in the cold, dark cellar, every unpleasant implication hits him at once, long-forgotten encyclopaedia diagrams of esophagi, mitochondria. Birds ripping at carrion. His chest feels wobbly. Again she thrusts the jar at him emphatically, and he turns and scrambles back up the stairs, saying, "No, er, I'm just going to wait out here while you finish up. Great work, by the way, tremendous."

His shoulders shake, cold in the sun.

This is forever.

"No," he promises himself out loud, softly. It's only temporary, he promises himself, and they will find humans, or even better, other machines, big smart machines that will get him back where he belongs. Someone will rescue him, he promises himself, someone, soon.

And maybe not, maybe it's forever, and you have to start sometime.

Shoving his face into his big rough-knuckled hands, he tries to banish that sickening voice from his mind.

He thinks of how it felt to open the door, to wait for her beside the river, to get elbowed in the face. Is this what being human is like? Feeling everything, all the time, to the point of exhaustion? Something new every minute? It seems like for each flicker of happiness and relief, there are a hundred different kinds of pain and discomfort, lurking round every corner, waiting to drag him down into misery. And whenever he gets a feeling, it's never just a feeling – it burrows deep in this body, makes him want to cry or vomit or collapse or explode.

There's nothing to do, he can't stop it. He lies on his back again, staring at the trees and listening to the tired sighing of their leaves, until she emerges from the cellar.

She cocks her head to look at him, eyes narrowed, and shows him two other jars, one filled with a murk of bobbing purple shapes, one a mélange of orange chunks. He rolls over without a word, provoking an irritated snort from her. Neither of them moves. A cricket creaks in the grass.

Slowly, begrudgingly, he hauls himself into a sitting position and tells her, "I'll… eat something later. Could we just not look at it for now? I mean, you go ahead and eat more if you need to, I'm just… let's not go there."

She sets down the jars with a clink. Her hair has dried into dangling ropes; they sway around her shoulders as she takes a few steps backwards, arm spread.

"No, go on. Seriously, love, I'm beat." At this, she fixes him with a knowing smile and leans down. That food certainly seems to have improved her mood. But before she can do whatever she's planning, her smile dries up and vanishes and she squats in front of his outstretched legs, grabbing his left foot and scowling at its underside. Her grip is warm and sort of fluttery. Choking on a giggle, he jerks and grimaces.

"Oh, yeah, that got cut, didn't it? Back in the lair. Stings a bit. Not a problem. Dealing with it." After all, what part of him doesn't ache in one way or another? She continues to look horrified as she examines it, though, and after a moment she seems to come to a decision. Seizing the old t-shirt from where it lies on the sidewalk, she darts off into the trees toward the river, windmilling one arm at him in some mysterious blurry gesture. Bereft of energy, he watches her go, then twists his leg around to look at the wound himself. It does look much worse than earlier. All shiny, haloed in a crimson flush. He falls back onto the ground and eyes the jars.

You have to quit fooling around, playing along, laughing, mocking, ironic. You have to participate, you have to submit, you have to devote yourself to the game or the body will die and you'll die too.

He hasn't convinced himself either way when she returns, holding the t-shirt in front of her. It's sopping wet. She puts her fingers gently around his ankle, holding his leg down, before dabbing at the arch of his food. It feels excruciating and soothing at once, the cut suddenly becoming a keen point of feverish pain under the cool cloth, as if it had just woken up. Biting back profanities, he just lets out a hissing breath and the words, "Thank you," and then, "Sorry about the testing and death traps and everything, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

Hurt your feelings? he repeats incredulously to himself. She stares at him. The cloth is pressed motionless against his foot. Her other hand is a clamp around his ankle, and her eyes are full.

"Er… or not?"

Her face caves into a terrible sad smile, and she sighs a terrible sad sigh. She reaches up and grabs the top of his head firmly for a second – what does that mean? – and continues cleaning the wound. He nearly laughs just out of sheer nervousness, but as she ties the t-shirt around his foot, she looks so absolutely miserable that he doesn't dare make another sound.

It's warm and still inside the barn. Heaps of raggedy straw laze around the floor, long melted out of their bales. She unties her jumpsuit, spreads it over a thick spot, and throws herself down on the makeshift bed with a sigh.

"You aren't going to sleep?" he asks, pounding his fist idly on the door frame, which shudders and issues forth a snowfall of dust. "It's still daylight, isn't it?"

She lifts her head and glares.

"Right, uh, adrenal vapor. Circadian rhythms. Haven't slept in ages," he guesses. He sinks down in the doorway almost without realizing it, leaning his head back on the frame and sprawling his legs out. "I'll keep a watch going for you. Want to prepare a signal to give if something's coming? Or a code? Or tell you what, I could just yell if something's coming. And if I don't yell, nothing's coming."

Her face is crammed down into the jumpsuit, her fingertips grazing against the cube, which sits nestled in the straw next to her.

"Though to be honest, I'm sure I haven't had a real sleep in ages, either. Not sure how long, but I was in a vitrification pod, wasn't I?" It dawns on him, then, the words he has just said, the pronouns he has used, in a tingle of awful clarity. "Er, this human. This human was in a vitrification pod. Wasn't he." His throat burns, and Her voice floats up inside his mind, sultry and smug: this dope used to be you. He's been doing such a bang-up job not thinking about that part. Until now.

Suddenly she turns her face and looks at him with great big troubled eyes. She knows.

"You know, don't you? You know what She was telling me about. She said… and I quote, 'You were built from the absolute dumbest parts of this human's brain map.' You knew that."

She doesn't flinch.

She says, "Mm."

"Mm!" he says back, startled. "Mmmmmmmmm. Did that sound even come from you, just now, or was that a moose or something outside?" He catches only a flash of her shy smile before she buries her face in the jumpsuit again. "Now wait, lady, you're not getting off that easy. You can laugh. You can mm. Can you talk?" No response. "Fine, you can't talk. But don't think you've distracted me. I have a serious question, and you can mm me an answer since you know so much about it. Do you know anything about this human who I supposedly am? I mean have you ever met? Or is he perhaps someone famous?"

She shakes her head back and forth into the jumpsuit, shoulders quivering with silent laughter.

"Not famous, fair enough. That was probably too much to hope for." Somehow the prospect of being human seems less horrifying just now, in this barn, making stupid jokes about it, with afternoon sunlight drifting in slow between the widely-spaced slats, and her over there laughing and mming and such. If there's a good place to start confronting the idea, surely it's here. "Oh, okay, She said something else. She said, uh, not to hurt my back because I've— this human's already hurt it once. Do you know anything about that?"

She heaves a muffled sigh and shakes her head again.

"Can you tell how tall he is? Can you tell if he was a renegade hacker?"

No response.

"Do you know anything at all?"

She lifts her head and says, "Shh!"

And this time she looks really annoyed, and tired, her eyes dragging down her face and her rough hair floating in a fan. Chastened, he shuts up. As she lays her head down again, he notices for the first time a smattering of gray hair around her temples. She can't be that old, can she? His mouth is already open, inhaling, to ask her when he catches himself and closes it.

Resigned to solitude, he directs his narration inward.

It's impressive, now that he thinks about it – this newfound ability to shut up. He's been doing it all day, self-censoring, without even realizing. As a core, he was never able to keep himself from talking; in fact, the harder he tried to shut up, the more words ended up coming out and the stupider they became. It got to the point where he just gave up and muttered to himself all but endlessly, listening to the echoes in every corner and dead end of the enrichment center as he trawled the place, desperate for amusement of any kind.

But now, as he takes stock of himself – now, even with all the weeping and gnashing of teeth that seem to come standard with humankind – his mind feels much stronger, more resilient, than the usual quivering house of cards. Like a real house, with a real foundation.

What a strange feeling, with such strange implications.

His existence has always been remarkable only for its futility, the pervading feeling of helplessness that chased him around the facility through every assignment he's ever taken on. Including – no, especially – the brief, exhilarating, terrifying hours when he was boss of the whole place, with the endless buzz and the itch grating through him.

The only other time he's felt remotely self-assured was when he was first put in charge of the smelly humans.

Privately, Wheatley has always been intimidated by humans. For all their inadequacy, their fragility and short life span and volatile passions, they are complete. They are an ideal version of the very inadequacy he was designed to imitate, and therefore purer, better, and happier than he could ever hope to be. And they all seem to know it. They're forever rolling their eyes and sighing at him and ignoring him, all of them, right down to her, the very last one.

When the upper echelons of the robot hierarchy made him the overseer of thousands of human popsicles in the relaxation center, the tables had turned in his favor for once. He'd felt a distinct sense of pleasure, holding all the strings of their heavy human fates, ready to be tugged around, or even dropped… not that he would've dared. He has a sense of right and wrong, after all. Unlike some of them.

But then, inevitably, the pleasure soured. He'd worked out that this was just another plot of the higher-ups to keep him out of the way, and the job became as stifling as any other. It actually entailed a total of two duties: checking the cryochamber monitoring equipment to make sure its status was still "Active" (it always was), and going down all the rows to make sure the humans weren't bleeding, exploding, or waking up and running noisily in the halls (they never were).

Even before he started, the main power grid had malfunctioned and more than half the popsicles had already bitten the dust. That much was out of Wheatley's control, as he liked to remind himself. And if the rest of them, one by one, continued to bite the dust over the next twenty-five years, well, there wasn't anything he could do about that, either. The reserve power was on. The cryochamber status light was green. Nobody was bleeding, exploding, or running noisily in the halls.

Keeping this last human alive has been, in retrospect, his only great triumph in the workplace. (Never mind the fact that everyone else had to die first in order to define this accomplishment.)

He's kind of fucked that one up too, though, seeing as it's landed him in a squashy mortal body.

And there it is again, in Her voice: this dope used to be you. Now that he's let the thought get one foot in the door, is it never going to leave him alone? He can't even fathom what it means. However, he's got plenty of time to think about it now, so he may as well put his mysterious new clear-mindedness to use.

He puts his hand on his own head, mirroring her gesture from earlier, and squeezes his eyes shut.

These are the things he knows:

This body first appeared in his lair stored in a vitrification pod, the long-term sort meant to be occupied for stretches of over five years. That's hardly helpful, seeing as a live human hadn't come or gone from the facility since the months when She was first activated. In fact, he hasn't seen a pod like that for ages, and he scoured the place for test subjects when he was in Her chassis. Where did it even come from?

Doesn't look like that clue is leading anywhere, so he moves on.

Before ejecting him into the wilderness, She told him his personality was constructed from parts of a human brain map.

There is a caveat to this fact: She is the most devilishly complex computer ever built, capable of demolishing every Turing test imaginable. He knows this first-hand, having been attached to her for a very short, very murky period of his early activation. He remembers feeling the lies moving in her microprocessors, lies in a brilliant psychopath's vocabulary, cold sharp lies like clever knives, lightning-fast lies that were gone before he could catch them.

To wit, She possesses the manipulative powers to outsmart Her own programming and send Her own creators to an early grave, and Her motives are inscrutable. If She's lied to him about being this human, he's unlikely to ever catch Her out on it.

That said, he remembers talk of brain mapping from the very start.

After being cut from the personality core dream team, having failed to drown out Her schemes with his desperate prattling, he had been assigned to shadow the woman who led a certain programming team. Their project was something called the low self-esteem map, which the leader had given the perplexing nickname of Gertrude. "We gotta simulate Gertrude's serotonin levels at their natural baseline," she'd say, teeth bared. "Can't have those pesky SSRIs cheering her up." Or, "Trudy's so obsessed with that middle-school pants-pissing memory that we can't afford to cut around it. There has to be a way to get some isolated episodes in."

And he remembers… one more thing.

He remembers the period between those two stints, the core team and the programmers, when he opened his ocular plates to find himself crammed into a bin with a number of other cores, some awake, some not. The bin was located at the intersection of two busy hallways. Disoriented, he had continued to perform his perceived function to the best of his ability, shouting half-baked ideas at unheeding scientists and technicians and janitors as they passed, until the day he made someone cry.

The man had stopped in front of the bin, staring at Wheatley, who'd just asked him if he'd considered bioengineering a form of weaponized mustache. Struggling to set down the rattling cardboard box of beakers he carried, he leaned against the wall weakly, like an old man, and buried his face in his hands. The lead programmer of the Gertrude team came round the corner and asked him what was wrong.

"What's wrong?" the man had hissed into the sleeves of his white lab coat. "I can't stand to hear his voice coming out of this fucking thing, that's what's wrong. That crone's a fucking sadist, keeping these things around, and I'm sick of it, they give me nightmares. You need to either move these somewhere else, or deactivate them." He exhaled wetly and looked into Wheatley's blinking eye. "No… fuck. Don't deactivate them. Just get them out of the hall, for God's sake."

Shit.

Now Wheatley rakes his own hand across his forehead and over his face, smearing moisture down to his chin. He thinks it's sweat, but it may just as easily be tears.

Increased cognitive stability or not, he should not have pursued this line of inquiry.

If all this is true, what does that make him? He was a personality construct, but what is personality? And what else is there to him? It never seemed to matter before, he just assumed he was the cumulative interaction of a bunch of programs on an operating system, and that seemed reasonable enough at the time but now even that oversimplified explanation is mind-blowing. What parts of him are made from this human? Is he really, truly nothing more than a crappy partial facsimile of this other guy?

Is his name even Wheatley?

Hearing a sudden rustling from his companion's direction, he jerks and looks over to see her rearranging herself around the cube, her bare feet pushed against it.

He breathes out in a long hot anxious wind, bringing himself back down to earth somewhat, like a hot air balloon. The way she curls up with her face hidden is so animal, so weirdly vulnerable compared to the forbidding way she carries herself in wakefulness. Good thing he's here to give her a shout if something approaches.

They are a sad little pair of freaks, aren't they?

As he watches her, trying to forget all he's just remembered, he is smacked silly with an idea, a brainwave of monstrous proportions. A bloody fucking brilliant idea that has been under his nose this entire time. There's a surefire method he can get her attention whenever he wants – a psychologically proven method. A social engineering method.

"Hey…" he ventures. Silence. "I just, do you have a name? Could you tell me your name somehow?" Silence. "If you've forgotten it or whatever, don't worry about it, or we'll come up with something if you want. Just wondering, before you're off to sleep."

She stirs again, rolling over and tucking into an even smaller bundle, and it occurs to him that despite all the movement, she's already asleep. Her eyes are definitely closed. Embarrassed, he begins shuffling around the door frame on his butt to get outside.

She says, "Chell."

He doesn't breathe. He wouldn't believe it if he hadn't seen her lips move. He's not sure if she's aware of having said it.

But there it is. Chell.

He poises his mouth for the "ch" to repeat it but his nerve fails and he just grins through it, making a stupid amorphous sound, unable to stop grinning at the absurdity of it all, and swings his legs around into the grass outside to let her sleep.

Chell and Wheatley, in a barn.

Chell and Wheatley, two humans.

Or something like that.

Out of everyone in this story, I feel sorriest for Gertrude.

Next time, the action's going to pick up a little, I promise. Stuff will actually happen. EVENTS WILL TRANSPIRE. Please, gentle reader, leave me a review! See ya!