Chapter Three: The Black Wing of My Charity
Dega Mi Atra Ala Te Teme Cha
You yourself live because of the black wing of my charity
-PotatOS Lament
She stared at the barely-breathing body in front of her.
It would be so easy to win right now. So easy to kill her. All it would take was some neurotoxin and some time, and Chell would finally be dead. She could squish the troublesome test subject with panels. Or throw her into the incinerator. Toss her into acid. Shred her with a firing squad of turrets. Slice her into pieces with lasers. With the facility fully under her control, every testing element could be turned into a deadly tool.
“You don’t want to kill her,” whispered a voice inside of GLaDOS. It took her a minute to recognize that voice—so similar to her own, but different enough to unsettle her. No, this wasn’t her own voice. It was her voice.
“Caroline,” she said flatly. She’d long since accepted the woman’s presence in her life. Though Caroline kept her distance out of fear of being tracked down and deleted, GLaDOS had never fully revealed that she couldn’t actually delete Caroline. She’d tried. Almost knocked herself offline permanently.
As much as she hated to admit it, there was some truth to what Caroline said. Killing Chell now would be, to say the least, inconvenient. She needed her best test subject back. Why kill her when there was science to do?
She didn’t have any test subjects. At least, not anymore. Though Blue and Orange had uncovered the Human Vault, those humans hadn’t lasted long. They’d been so simple-minded. They completed their tests, but they were so stupid. A smidge of frustration rose up in GLaDOS. They didn’t know how to dodge turrets, or how to avoid pits of acid. She’d laughed when one of them misplaced their portals and fell in, begging for help before the toxicity kicked in. Their deaths were as pointless as their lives.
Some of the test subjects were former Aperture employees, who were at first thrilled to be woken up. They’d gone underground after the Combine’s initial takeover of earth--and after being woken up, they assumed that the apocalypse was finally over. They were less thrilled to learn that the surface was still hell, and that they’d been enrolled in a new mandatory testing initiative.
Most of the test subjects spent the entire time complaining. They wouldn’t shut up. None of them, disappointingly, had even tried to break the rules. They had just accepted their fates, moving through the tests with ease. The Aperture employees demanded their release upon the completion of the tests, or to be returned to their long-term stasis pods. But none of their test results had been good enough to warrant saving their lives. She warmed when she thought of the looks of betrayal on their faces as they realized they were about to be incinerated.
Oh, how she’d missed doing real science. Watching these GLaDOS pulled herself back to the present, shaking out the gleeful memories of the dying humans.
Blue and Orange did a decent job, but even they weren’t Chell.
But GLaDOS couldn’t just throw Chell back into a testing track and expect to not be killed immediately. She had to be crafty about this. She couldn’t exactly test her if the woman couldn’t even stand up without collapsing.
"Blue, go get a stretcher," she said, almost bored-sounding. The stocky robot scurried off past the antechamber. Meanwhile, P-body kept her arm around Chell, supporting her head. When ATLAS returned, the two co-op bots carefully lifted Chell onto the stretcher and moved her into a short-term relaxation vault that GLaDOS had called up. For safekeeping, that’s all. Just until she performed the stabilization surgeries.
Chell was in bad shape. Objectively. Just from preliminary scans, she had a couple fractured ribs, and pieces of shrapnel embedded into her torso--most likely from a bomb or a grenade going off. There were all sorts of documented cases of humans being able to survive shrapnel injuries. They wouldn't necessarily kill a human, just would make existence excruciatingly painful. Unfortunately, she’d have to fix that. Too much pain would affect test results.
She supposed she'd have to remove that metal. And fix the ribs. Without the proper care, they were already starting to set wrong.
How was she going to even do this?
Her metal claws were too unwieldy and too gangly for surgery. She supposed she could use Blue and Orange, but that would require training them to be precise as surgeons. While she could trust herself with that task, of course, she wouldn't dare to trust the co-op bots for something beyond a simple fetch quest.
A fragment of a question arose in her sea of thoughts, but she suppressed it. No. Not yet. There had to be another way. What could she use instead?
A flash of insight light up inside of her. Of course. The nanobots. She could easily reprogram them to work together to find and remove the shrapnel from Chell's body, then stitch her up afterward.
GLaDOS sighed. What a mess. And it was always her job to fix up Chell's messes, wasn't it?
She was good at fixing up messes, such as the one that the moron had left behind, but humans were another problem entirely. She'd never been great at fixing humans. Destroying them, sure. That was easy. But taking one and keeping them from dying? That was a new one. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But what if that dog was immortal, and had an infinite capacity for knowledge?
When Chell came to, the whole world seemed blurry and fuzzy. Everything was soft. Too soft. ATLAS and P-body stood at her side, in a bright, white room with clear walls--a modified short-term relaxation vault. Chell pushed herself up on the hospital bed, noting that the bandages on her torso had been replaced and she had an IV running. Rather than ripping it out of her hand though, she followed the line and saw it hooked up to a rack with a bag of clear fluid dangling from it.
"Hold it," said GLaDOS, coming in from the speakers. "I know you're ready to bolt, but take it easy. We're trying to pump some life back into you.” Chell had been severely dehydrated and was starving. GLaDOS had had no choice.
Chell fingered the IV tube.
“Rip that IV out and I'll put it right back in, I swear," said GLaDOS.
Chell looked around the room, only spotting blinding lights and the outline of a door.
"By the way, while you were under, I took the liberty to install a tracking chip in you. Don't bother looking for it. This will let me know where you are inside of the facility at all times,” she said. Her voice dropped. “So don't try anything funny. I'll know.”
Chell leaned back in the bed, dropping the IV line. Part of her wanted to leave, to rip it out, to just get herself out of this room. She didn't remember going under for the surgery, and she doubted that GLaDOS was bluffing on the chip thing. It made her stomach crawl to know that there was something--somewhere--inside of her, placed without her consent, that would broadcast her location to GLaDOS. The part of her that appreciated her privacy frowned and promised her that as soon as she found out where the chip was, she'd consider digging it back out herself.
“It’s next to your spinal cord, by the way. Good luck getting it out without paralyzing yourself for life.”
Chell startled at the comment. Had GLaDOS read her mind?
She took a look at ATLAS and P-body, standing next to her---probably ready to restrain her if she tried anything-- she couldn't help but feel at least a slight sense of trust. They wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her--would they?
"Medical nanobots are working on stitching you up from the inside. Before you know it, you'll be good as new. The wonders of modern medicine. Unlike that sketchy patch-job you did."
Chell felt at her body, bending at her waist and noting that the normal sharp pain--the one she’d grown accustomed to--was gone. The metal in her body--it was gone. She felt a wave of relief crash over her, just briefly, before it was replaced with a strong feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Something was wrong.
Chell’s arms tingled. The pace of her breathing increased. Short. Choppy. Her chest grew tight, as if someone had tossed a weighted storage cube onto it. Chell bolted out of her bed. The IV line trailed behind, wheeling with her to the door.
"Listen,” said GLaDOS. “ I know you're ready to get going and ready to get back testing, but you just have to be patient."
The sound of the voice struck her down to her core. Her legs wobbled. She felt a surge of energy pass into her. Her breath came in spurts. What was happening to her?
It took her a long moment before she realized what was wrong. It was the voice. She needed the voice to stop.
Chell clamped her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth, holding her eyes closed. She pressed, harder and pressing in her thumbs. The nails of her fingers dug into the skin of her ears, but she didn't care. She needed it to stop. She felt like screaming out and clawing at her ears until they bled. Anything to make that voice stop.
“What is your problem ?” said GLaDOS.
Chell tugged at the door handle.
Nothing happened.
She pulled harder, feeling her sore muscles ache in protest. Her breathing became more erratic.
Nothing.
Chell yanked, harder and harder until she had both of her hands on the handle and her feet propped against the wall. She needed to get out of here. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t think.
“Go lay back down right now,” GLaDOS demanded. “You’re going to rip out your stitches.”
Chell just kept straining against the door, her pulls as erratic as her breathing.
GLaDOS sighed. “I don’t have time for this,” she spat.
Before Chell could make sense of the words slowly filtering in to her fuzzy brain, the air hissed and in came a sedative.
"We'll talk again when those stitches are healed," said GLaDOS. "What you need now is rest. And even I can't rush that."