Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Chapter Nineteen
Wheatley’s head was pounding.
He stared blearily at the ceiling, not wanting to move for fear it would make things worse. Though he didn’t think anything could be done about that. He raised his arm to look at his watch. Half past six. Though work was the last thing he wanted to do right now.
Wait.
He rolled over slowly, squinting for his glasses. He was on his couch. Why wasn’t he at Aperture with GLaDOS?
“Here.”
Wheatley’s fingers closed around his glasses, which he shoved onto his face, and Henry came into view, sitting on the armchair next to the couch. He looked… he looked like he’d been crying.
“What… what’re you doing at my house?” he asked confusedly. “And what’ve you, what’re you doing on my computer?”
Henry rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “You don’t remember a thing, do you.”
“Remember what?”
Henry picked up the laptop and placed it on Wheatley’s lap. Wheatley’s face drained of blood as he realised what Henry had been doing.
“You’ve been… you’ve been reading…”
Henry pressed a pair of Aspirin tablets into his hand and put a glass of water on the table next to him. “No. She deleted those.”
“She wouldn’t!” But even as Wheatley searched frantically for them, his heart sank. They were gone. All of the emails were gone. “Henry, what’s going on?”
“Read the ones she sent me.”
“You’ve been talking to her.” For a long moment, Wheatley was horribly, wildly jealous. Only he was supposed to email GLaDOS. GLaDOS was his!
“I had to,” Henry snapped. “You were – just read the damn emails already.”
Wheatley started at the oldest, scanning through them quickly. It seemed to be a discussion between Henry and GLaDOS about something Wheatley had said in the bar…
“What did I say?” Wheatley asked in confusion, not finding it in the messages. “What happened?”
“Long story short, you spilled the beans. You got plastered, declared to everyone that you loved GLaDOS, decked Greg for accusing us of screwing her, and then I took you home.”
“And she rearranged the camera footage…” Wheatley said, following the relevant information on the screen with his finger. “She… called me?”
“That’s right.”
Wheatley looked down at the keyboard, clenching the tablets in his fist. “I don’t remember.”
“That’s a shame,” said Henry quietly. “Take those. Before you get sick.”
Wheatley did as he was told without thinking about it, still following the emails as fast as he could. “Why’s that a shame?”
“Because you’re never going to speak to her again.”
Wheatley looked over at Henry, startled. “Wait, wait… back up… I did what?”
Henry sighed and folded his arms. “You were drunk. You told us that you loved GLaDOS. Greg started accusing you of… fooling around with her. So you punched him out. I brought you here. He went to Aperture. To check the cameras.”
“And?”
Henry motioned with his head. “Keep reading.”
GLaDOS had retooled all the camera footage as best she could, erasing all of the nights he had stayed and slept there as well as replacing the parking lot footage with that which she’d lifted from other days, but there was no way she could satisfactorily patch everything. There was still plenty of evidence of a relationship. She had deleted all the emails, erasing them from every server they were hosted on, as well as her own hard drive where she’d stored hers.
Wheatley had to stop reading there, putting the laptop down on the coffee table in front of him. “And… why are you here?”
“She asked me to stay.” Henry rubbed at his face, from his right eye down to his chin. “I talked to her while she was doing that stuff.”
“I haven’t got time to read all of it, have I?” Wheatley asked quietly.
“Not really. I… wish I’d talked to her earlier. Under different circumstances.”
“You should have.” Wheatley twisted his fingers together. “Anything I need to know?”
“Halfway through the conversation she disappeared for an hour or so. When she got back, she said that she’d just scanned through all her emails and wanted to know who I was and how I got her address. She… doesn’t remember you, Wheatley. They removed you from her memory.”
“They’ve tried,” Wheatley whispered. “She’ll remember. She’ll have thought of that. She had a plan.”
“She thanked you, you know.”
“For what?”
Henry looked very sad, looking down at the carpet beneath his feet. “Before you passed out, you told her you loved her.”
“I did?” Wheatley said, joy inexplicably rising through the pain in his chest. “I did tell her?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Henry,” Wheatley whispered, his face in his hands.
“What in the hell does it matter?” Henry exclaimed, sounding oddly helpless. “She’s not going to remember!”
“Maybe not today,” Wheatley said, running a quick search through his messages so he could see it for himself. “Maybe not tomorrow. But she’ll remember. She will.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You don’t forget your first love, Henry.”
“You think she loved you?”
“Even if she didn’t,” Wheatley said, locating the message and clicking on it, “she knows I love her.”
Tell him I said thank you. For what he said.
Do you want me to tell him anything else?
That’s as sensitive a message I’m going to send with a person I don’t even know.
You can trust me.
I trust no one.
What about Wheatley?
If you’ve finished asking nosy questions, I have work to do.
Wheatley couldn’t help but laugh. Typical GLaDOS. Answering the question without answering it.
“She wouldn’t answer any of my questions,” Henry said, somewhat petulantly, and Wheatley looked up.
“Since when has she ever answered a question a scientist asked her?”
“We have to get going.” Henry stood up, rolling his shoulders slightly. “If you have anything you need to say to her, now is the time.”
Wheatley stared at the keyboard.
He didn’t have time to read all of the messages. If he had anything to say to her, now was the time.
He was participating in an experiment that he’d not gotten a memo about.
“I’m… not coming back, am I.”
Henry rubbed at the stubble on his upper lip. “You don’t have to go back. Leave. Go someplace else. Get out of here.”
Wheatley drummed his fingers on the table. He was feeling the prickling of that peaceful feeling coming over him again. He wasn’t sure why. He was pretty sure he should have been panicking about then, should have been leaping into his car and driving as fast as he could. But he didn’t want to.
“Why,” he said quietly, not really phrasing it as a question. “Why run.”
“Why not?”
“She can’t. She tried, that first day. But she couldn’t. And she’s stood her ground ever since.”
“You don’t have any ground to stand on.”
“If I run, I’m just going to regret it for the rest of my life,” Wheatley said, clicking on the Reply button and setting his fingers to the keys. “I found what I was looking for. No sense in setting out trying to find something’s already been found.” And he felt a bit guilty, remembering that he’d promised her he would go home. He obviously wasn’t going to be doing that. But she would believe he’d gone, if she remembered him that is, and that was enough to quell the guilt.
“Wheatley, you’re being stupid!” Henry said in exasperation. “You’re not old. There will be other people!”
Wheatley laughed, shaking his head. “There will never be anyone that can measure up to her. D’you really think I could ever, could ever be happy with someone else, having had her?”
“You’re crazy,” Henry said tiredly, rubbing his eyes. “I should tie you up and take you to the nuthouse.”
“Give me ten minutes,” Wheatley said, turning back to the screen. “If I’m not coming back, I should message my sister as well.”
Henry threw up his hands. “If you have a sister, why don’t you just go home?”
Wheatley looked up.
“I dunno how to explain it t’you, Henry. I just… I don’t want to. I don’t want to go home, and I don’t want to find another girl, and I just… plain ol’ don’t want to. I’m just… peaceful, Henry.”
“You’ve got a hangover and you’re doped up on Aspirin. Believe me, it’ll pass.”
Wheatley doubted anyone could get ‘doped up’ on two tablets, but Henry was obviously not going to understand. He knew, deep down inside, that it was not residual alcohol or medicine making him feel this way. Even if he’d had doubts, he remembered full well how this same peace had felt over the last couple of weeks. Maybe he was going to die. That was okay. He’d had all he’d ever wanted, and he knew he would never have it again. As awful as it would be to die, it would be even worse to go back to the zombie life he’d been living before he’d met her. Dead and alive, until GLaDOS had opened the box. He smiled and brought his fist to his mouth, a single tear coming up out of his eye. God, he loved her so much. He wasn’t going back in that box, ohhh no. He was staying out of it even if it killed him.
“Ten minutes, Henry.”
Henry shook his head and crossed his arms, leaning against the wall in the hallway. Wheatley stared at the blinking cursor on the screen for a long time, and then finally he began to write.
Wheatley wondered if she was trying to figure out who he was.
He was being tracked by Surveillance, he knew that for sure. But was she paying attention? Did she think he was just another insignificant intern? Or was there a spark of recognition, somewhere? He doubted they’d really pulled him out of her memory entirely; memory was tricky, and even supposing it was possible to erase everything that they’d done together, things would remind her. Things would happen that would point out to her the holes, the spots that were missing, and from the missing pieces she would remember. She would. She was so very clever, she was.
Henry had tried to convince Wheatley not to go, all the way to the facility even when it was far too late to turn back, but Wheatley had merely draped his arm out the window and stared through the windscreen. Henry didn’t know what the box was like. Henry had never been inside the box. He would never understand why Wheatley didn’t want to get back into it. And even though the world was closing in on him and time was growing short, at least he was on the inside looking in, instead of on the outside looking in.
She’d been right; they were trying to shame him. She hadn’t quite got the whole story, and he was glad she hadn’t, because he knew without a doubt she would have become irrepressibly angry, but even in her limited knowledge of the situation she had been right. They were whispering behind their hands at him, elbowing each other and laughing, but he only ignored the hurt coiling in his stomach and went on his way like always, smiling cheerfully at them and saying hello, walking down the endless hallways with his hands stuffed into his jeans pockets and his bare feet stuffed into his scuffed brown loafers. Some of them gave him funny looks, as if he should be running through the halls with a paper bag over his head until he could duck down in front of his monitor for the day, and he smiled to himself thinking about it. It would have been pretty funny. Yes, he loved a supercomputer. So what. Stranger things had happened. No need to pick on him for it. And no need to let it get to him, either. He was sort of glad he wasn’t going to have to rub shoulders with these kinds of people anymore. He didn’t know where he was going, but if it was away from them, well, it would be good enough.
When he got to his office, he didn’t actually do any work; happily, he didn’t have an email from Mathilda demanding why he was dropping off the face of the Earth, and he stuck a Post-It note on the side of his screen to remind him to send his message to GLaDOS before they took him away to wherever he was going. Then he read all the emails between her and Henry, laughing at all the insults she dealt out to Henry and his clueless responses to them. Once he’d read them, he slowly deleted them, one by one, mostly because he didn’t have anything else to do, and then he decided to take a nap.
He dozed on and off for a few hours, and surprisingly no one leapt into his office to tease him or rebuke him, as far as he knew anyway, and when he woke up he packed up all his things neatly into one drawer so that there wouldn’t be a mess when they came in to throw it all out. Eventually they came to collect him for the experiment and he cheerfully went with them, after sending off his message and deleting it from his computer of course, and he got quite a measure of amusement out of the bewildered looks on their faces.
They took him to what seemed to be an operating room of sorts, and sitting on the edge of the table was none other than Greg. Wheatley smiled and waved at him. “’allo, Greg! How’re you getting on?”
“You have no clue what’s going on, do you?” Greg asked, sliding off the table.
“Not a clue,” he said dismissively, hoisting himself up on top of it.
“I told you he was an idiot,” Greg muttered to one of the other men in the room, a short sort of man with a blonde crew cut.
“D’you mind telling me?” Wheatley asked, lying down on the table and getting comfortable. “I know it doesn’t really matter, but do me a favour, will you, and tell me uh, let me know what this experiment’s about.”
“You’re just going to keep on doing what you do best,” Greg said, leaning on the table next to Wheatley’s head. “Being an idiot.”
“How’m I going to be doing that?”
“We’ve modified the consciousness transfer procedure,” one of the scientists offered, and Wheatley turned his head to see a taller Asian man. “We didn’t think we’d get a volunteer so quickly.”
“Oh, you know me,” Wheatley said amicably. “I aim to please. But what d’you want to do that for? Surely you wouldn’t replace her with me.”
“Replace? No. Let’s say we’re… providing her with you.”
“And that means…”
“Well, we obviously can’t let you near her anymore,” Greg said, walking around to the other side of the table. “Taking into account your… activities.”
“Ah, yes. You did find evidence of at least a snogging then, right?”
Greg ignored him and picked up a tool or another, inspecting it closely. “And yet she listens to no one but you. So you see we’re at an impasse. What do we do? We give you back. You don’t know we’ve done it, and she doesn’t know we’ve done it, and yet history will repeat itself, as it always does. We know she’s been fooling around in the system. We haven’t quite figured out what she’s done yet, but we need to put a stop to it. And that’s where you come in.
“We put you in a core and connect you to her core programming. Most of the time, you’ll spew nonsense, like you always do, but every once in a while you’ll come up with something we actually want you to do, and you’ll convince her to do it. Just like what you’ve been doing.”
“Haaaang on,” Wheatley frowned, sitting up. “So… you think you’re just going to stick me in a core and pop me into her brain, and I’m going to be able to control her, just like that?”
“Like I said. Just like what you’ve been doing. That was your job. To convince her to run the programs we wanted her to run.”
Wheatley laughed and lay back down, putting his arms behind his head. “Ohhh, good luck with that, mate. Not going to work, by the way. Just thought I’d warn you. She’s going to be pretty furious with you, though. So if you want her to hate you even more than she already does, well, that’s a pretty good way to go about it.”
“It will work,” Greg said, his voice too low and too steady.
“Sure it will. If she suddenly becomes a pure computer. Which she’s not. Never has been.”
“What do you mean?” asked the scientist with the crew cut.
“She’s alive,” Wheatley said, bored. He was honestly getting tired of trying to convince people of that. “D’you listen when complete strangers boss you about? ‘specially overly chatty ones? Doubt it. Without the connection, there’s nothing. She won’t listen to me. Not a program of me, anyway. You can try to force her to all you like. But she won’t.”
“She will do as she’s told,” Greg muttered. “One way or another.”
“Euphoria didn’t work. Withdrawal didn’t work. When you can’t convince someone with pleasure or pain, what’ve you got left?”
“Oh, there’ll be no more convincing. She’ll do as she’s told and that’s the end of it.”
“You must be quite jealous of me, going to all this trouble to get rid of me. We could share her, you know. Though contrary to popular belief, she doesn’t interface with human apparatus.”
Greg came around to glare down at Wheatley, who only smiled sweetly up at him.
“Only you would do something so sick and twisted, you desperate little – “
“You’re the one who brought it up, Greg.”
“Let’s get this started,” Greg snapped, waving his hand at the Asian man. Wheatley lay there quietly as they hooked him up to the machine, wondering if this was how it’d been done to Caroline. Or if they’d built a new machine to do it with. GLaDOS had never talked about her, other than when she’d told Wheatley about her dreams, so he didn’t know anything about the original upload.
“Oh yes, forgot to mention,” Greg sneered, leaning low over Wheatley’s head. Someone pricked his arm with what he supposed was a needle, because his eyelids had suddenly become very heavy. “Your memory won’t be going with you. Even with a brain capacity like yours, it won’t fit on the hard drive.”
“YES!” Wheatley cried out, and he would have put his fists in the air if his arms hadn’t been strapped down.
“What,” Greg asked, barely visible. Wheatley’s vision was getting blurry, lack of glasses notwithstanding.
“I get to find her all over again,” Wheatley told him, a little deliriously. He didn’t know if Greg actually heard him, seeing as he was suddenly falling asleep. And he didn’t know if it was relief, or happiness, or just the effects of whatever drug they’d stuck in his arm to make him collapse like this, but he started laughing. This was not an end. Ohh no. It was a beginning, a wonderful, glorious new beginning, and even if they really did manage to stick him in there without sending any of his memory with him, it didn’t matter. He didn’t care, because he was still at peace and he was perfectly content to set the old Wheatley to rest and let the new one have his way.
He did not fight the medication, did not struggle to stay awake or keep his breathing from slowing. He was going to keep his chin up, and he was going to remember why he’d gone to her in the first place. And she would remember, and she would remind him, one day, and they would find each other again. They would find each other, and he would be her friend forever, because he had not lied and no matter what these scientists thought they were doing, they were only helping him to keep his promise.
Now you make me two promises.
I’ll decide after I see them.
Promise you will never lie to me.
I promise.
Promise you will be my friend forever.
I promise. 
And then there was what he should have said, but hadn’t, but that was all right. He would. One day.
I will always love you, GLaDOS.
I promise.
