Chell was dead. Of this, Wheatley was entirely certain except for times when he was not.

Those times came more often than he liked to admit. All would be well as he worked on an experiment to make weighted cubes bounce onto buttons with propulsion gel, and suddenly he'd feel a chill all through his enormous artificial body. He'd catch a sudden movement that turned out to be Atlas or a stray turret and be forced to issue a sternly-worded explosion for disturbing his peace. "No consideration! None whatsoever," he'd mutter before returning to his practice of painting the walls with gel.

He thought at first to delete the doubts, except he had no idea where to find them. A search of his own database brought up a massive archive of files. Truly he was the greatest repository of knowledge on the planet! So much knowledge he didn't even know what most of it was or what it meant. Unfortunately, search after search failed to bring up . Moreover, he found the more he tried not to think about the possibility, the more it came up.

"Well, I'm sure she's dead," he told a frankenturret for lack of a better audience. Frankenturrets were good listeners and he was certainly not ready to dig out the Therapeutic Discussion Core to hear his woes. "She's got to be, because she's not here. I do scans, you know! Well, scans for as much as I can cover. This place is huge. Caught a mantis-man down there last week! Well, catch is a strong word because the little bugger-bugger! That was clever of me, eh?-well, he went and hid somewhere. Rather cute in an abominable sort of way. Think I might keep him around, name him Manny!" He laughed, flaring out his fin-plates, and the frankenturrets tried in vain to laugh with him. "Aw, just kidding. I'll kill him next time I find him. Don't know how clean those things are."

"But you know, she's got to be dead! That has to be what happened. I...killed her, yeah? Figured out her name a while back, by the way. Had to look through the records because she certainly wasn't going to tell me with those terrible manners of hers. Never said a bloody word. Very sketch if you ask me! Well, she was called Chell Redacted, apparently. Unusual last name, isn't it?" Wheatley nodded, an indication that the frankenturret was supposed to echo his sentiments at this point. It trembled in agreement.

"I know she's dead because I remember wanting to kill her, and her wanting to kill me or at least do something to me, and her little potato friend wanting to kill me. And I'm here, the reactor's working and both she and the potato are gone. Which means I won! Double-won, because the reactor's still working a whole...however many months later. And if I won, it means I achieved my goal." He nodded, feeling a lot better about himself for at least a few blissful moments.

The fact that his moment of triumph was obscured by static and confusion in his memory playback did nothing to weaken the sense his body gave him that this was the right conclusion. This was how things should be. He still lived in the body he should have had-always had? The rightful king was on His throne and He should not question what happened to an unsuccessful usurper.

"Hmm! Unsuccessful Usurper. There's a tongue-twister, eh?" He never could tell when he was thinking aloud. "Wonder why they call them that. Humans can't twist their tongues! But at least I can say it ten times fast, what with being a superior machine and a bloody genius and all. Unsuccessful Usurper. Unussessful….Unsuccessful Usperr...Right! Well, anyway. I admit, a bit worrying how I never found a body? Humans usually leave those behind when they die. But maybe in the glow of triumph I just deposited it in the incinerator or had the testing robots do that. Wish I could remember. Do you?"

The frankenturret made a faint chirping noise.

"...Well, do you?" He narrowed his optic and peered down at the frankenturret, basking it in the glare of his judgemental blue eye. "You're not keeping something from me, are you?! If you don't know anything there's nothing to hide, right? You can just say, 'No, Master Wheatley, I don't know anything!' or 'Yes, Master Wheatley, I definitely saw proof of you gloriously slaying that horrible murderess!'" He hung over his creation, offering a second of silence to punctuate his threat. "Well….?!"

The frankenturret only twitched in response, pulling its legs up under it.

"Oh, wait a minute!" Wheatley stopped himself, shook his core and laughed. "You wouldn't have seen it because I think I built you afterwards! You're one of the Mark 2s." The Mark 2 series of Frankenturrets had been constructed of Weighted Companion Cubes, the theory being they'd be more willing to perform tests properly because they were friendlier. It had not panned out. He lifted his body back upwards and rolled his eye. "Silly me! I keep forgetting. Time gets a little foggy sometimes, yeah? Well, you forgive me I'm sure. Chat with you later, eh mate?" He picked up the trembling Frankenturret with a crane-arm and tossed it off in a random direction, only realizing seconds later that he'd thrown it through the big hole in the chamber wall he kept forgetting to repair. It was probably going to fall for a long time. "Ah, whoops! Well, can't beat ourselves up for mistakes. He was too judgmental, anyway."

Lately everything seemed to judge. His own cameras peered at him from the walls like glaring red eyes. Test Chamber #322-E-17 refused to silence its own distress signal for his sake, lecturing him with a beep and an incessantly flashing light just because it was a little bit on fire. Even the announcer's chipper voice carried a hint of contempt. This strange prickling sensation slowly taking over his mind was worse than The Itch and more insistent; it felt like whispers and shadows just out of his line of sight, watching him. The only thing to do was to drown it out and focus on fulfilling the Itch, and the only way to do that was by testing.

"Right! Right then, scheduled...unscheduled testing monitoring time. Yes. Good. I can do this." He swiveled his body to a smooth section of the chamber wall as panels flipped over, revealing a projection of the active, inhabited test chambers. He could watch directly through the cameras, but this felt more fulfilling somehow.

The testing robots registered as Atlas and P-Body were fine enough at running tests, he supposed. Certainly they never broke monitors or rejected him on behalf of a stupid potato. Unfortunately, he'd started to notice something. The 'reward' he got from their successful completion of a test felt increasingly like diminished returns, and the Itch was getting more and more dominant. It didn't even let him rest long enough to ponder all the things he was sure he knew now.

Of course, being a brilliant machine who was not a moron he'd manage to come up with an equally brilliant and non-moronic solution to his problem. If two robots running one cooperative test wouldn't do it, build more to run several tests all at once! He'd found a storage unit filled with seemingly useful cores and the test robot bodies were easy to duplicate. It should have been a flawless plan.

"Hey! Hey, blue guy! Know you're watchin'!" A low chuckle came from one of the chambers, followed by a jump and a wave from its inhabitant. "You're always watching, aren't ya? Big old couch potato."

Should have been. The other nice thing about Atlas and P-Body was that in general they didn't talk much. He'd neglected to screen the cores he'd found for similar traits.

"Yes? Yes, what is it?" Wheatley sighed with as much suffering as he could dredge up and expanded the view of the offender's window. "What do you have to complain about now, mate?"

"I don't complain all that often. This here's constructive criticism," the Aperture Science Adventure Testing Unit drawled with a wave at the camera. "I thought you liked that."

"I don't. Frankly mate, if I wanted constructive criticism I have the Constructive Criticism Core for that. You know, the one I had incinerated five minutes after I found it. Which should tell you a thing about my views on constructive criticism. But God forbid I not be a perfectly benevolent boss to someone who won't even call me Master Wheatley like a proper testing robot, so sure! Go on. Anything so you'll do the test."

"Right! Yeah, the test. It's...uh, how to put it." Adventure's spherical body was standing on a moving platform over an electrified floor, and periodically he ducked under a laser. "It's too easy."

"Too...too easy?" Wheatley shrank his pupil in rage. He could have struck the screen if he thought it would do anything to Adventure. "Are you bloody kidding me?! I put a lot of work into that one! I mean, look. There on the wall. Wrote my name. And the-the bird's nest, that's a nice touch, yeah? Put that there myself." He hadn't, but he figured if parasitic creatures were going to nest in his Aperture he'd take credit for their efforts. Fair was fair.

"Yeah, that's what I mean. I've almost blown up three times today. Only three times!"

"Rebuilding you isn't exactly a walk in the bloody park! You cost...effort and time!" The testing robots could be rebuilt and re-uploaded into new bodies at any time thanks to their stored AI, a process applied to the original testing pair and easy to inflict on the new ones built from unused personality cores. It really wasn't hard to rebuild Adventure at all, but it took away precious time Wheatley could have been using to run more tests.

'Rick,' as he called himself, just shrugged. "I'm just saying, this place could benefit from a few more dangers. You know, consider alligators. Or lava. Ooh! Lavagators! That's science. You can make those, with your nerd science, right? Lavagators? Gimme credit, though."

"...Lavagators." Wheatley realized he was putting a claw over his own face, an unsettlingly human gesture of frustration. "That's a lovely idea mate, except for two things. One, I am quite sure alligators are not native to this area. And two, neither is lava! Pretty sure we'd know if it was. Place goes pretty far down. I don't...believe this is the natural habitat of, um, lava." Nonetheless, he made a note of it in and filed it away in his Brilliant Ideas I Had folder. "Look, just do the test!"

He shut off Rick's window and concentrated on the other test subjects. Supposedly there was a storage unit of humans somewhere, but he was done with humans. Robots, now they were trustworthy! You wouldn't look back on them and realize they were just using you the whole time to save their own hides. Robots were the best test subjects. They were…

"Fact: Abraham Lincoln was named after the logs."

...Actually a little obnoxious.

"Space? Space! Jump to space. Portal to space!"

"Fact: The Fact Sphere is much more likable than either Atlas or P-Body."

"Portal to portal to portal to SPAAAAAAACE."

In fact, they reminded him of a group of fussy children with him as the playground supervisor, hardly a position he imagined himself in as head AI. "Fact Sphere, Atlas and P-body heard what you said and you have hurt their feelings," Wheatley explained with a sigh to assuage the angry chirps coming from the duo. "Please apologize so they'll-"

"Oooo! Oooh! Boss! Space boss! After this test can I go to space?"

Wheatley flared out his fins to calm himself, shutting his optic for one moment. "Yes. Yes, after you complete this test, you can go to space." He was never sending Space Core into orbit, but making the promise for the Nth time usually seemed to motivate the yellow core.

The hunger for Test Solution Euphoria gnawed at him, only strengthened by the creepy-starey-judgey-questiony sensation spreading through his consciousness. He'd never felt that part when it was the lady testing, and the results had been magnificent! She was the best, honestly the best test subject there ever had been. It was a shame she had ignored her true talents and rejected her role. Truly a shame he had to kill her.

He barely felt the Euphoria anymore. For this he had no choice but to blame his test subjects. They just weren't as good.

"Fact: Wheatley did not actually start Aperture Science. Fact: Aperture Science was started by a superintelligent starfish named Cave-"

Somewhere in the far east wing of Aperture Science's massive underground facility, Chamber #90444-17C collapsed into itself.

"SHUT UP! SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!" Wheatley's screams echoed through Aperture, broadcast into every room he could access before he shut down the test-monitoring chambers again. This wasn't working the way it was supposed to, was it? This place was supposed to be a triumph. Chamber #90444-17C broadcast a distress signal. "YES," he sneered to no one, "I know! I know it's all wrecked because I wrecked it. Got to vent SOMEHOW. See what happens when everyone asks too much of me at once? Everyone making demands of me, nobody respecting my feelings or stress levels?"

She always seemed happy, the former master of Aperture, not that he could remember Her very often. (Sometimes he wondered if he'd imagined the time when She'd been in control. Hadn't it always been him? Memories were spotty things after all.)

"I don't get it." He let his body droop. "I do everything I'm supposed to do. I killed everyone who got in my way. Why won't the Itch stop? Why won't the...other feeling go away?! Everything's fine, it SHOULD be fine, it's…you know what? I'm doing this to myself." He righted himself, dimming the lights in his chamber. "Yes, nice relaxing lighting. Deep simulated breaths. I am merely undergoing stress and convincing myself an enemy is still alive. Two enemies! And one in a potato no less. How bloody ridiculous...you know what, one more search through the files. Just in case. Might be able to figure out what's doing this. Can't hurt!"

He scanned through files and files, folders within folders of the incredibly complex AI system that was...well, him now. The first few times he'd done it he'd been filled with a sense of wonder and awe at the sheer vastness of himself, and yet every time he ran a scan he couldn't quite recapture that feel. He was feeling smaller. Peculiar that. He was sure he was still bloody massive, his main body alone filling the chamber while he could expand his own mind to encompass the facility itself. "Yes, yes, that's right. Obviously need to prove something. To myself. Insecurity's normal, very healthy…maybe I should talk to that Therapeutic Discussion Core…-wait, what?"

He'd stopped on one archive he'd seen before but never bothered with. Backup data always struck him as a waste of time. He wasn't going to be erased anytime soon, so why worry about it? Besides, this file used an enormous amount of storage space comparatively. He could just delete it, except…

Except…

"...Would you look at that." Seeing whose backup data it was, and what it meant, should have brought the terrible feeling back in full force. It should have paralyzed him. And yet seeing Her there, so tiny and inactive and sleeping in the form of backup data, made him feel big again for the first time in months. He could delete that data at any time and wipe out the last trace of Her from the entire world. He could do that and he'd feel great. For a few minutes.

Then again, it wouldn't be hard to tamper with the data either, would it? It was technically his backup data now. He could tweak a few things here and there, and maybe trim it down so it wouldn't overwhelm hardware with storage capacities smaller than the Enormous Bloody Chassis. It would be nothing at all for a genius like him.

"And wouldn't it be fitting, you know? More fitting than a potato, even...I mean, she never really showed me proper fear. And maybe that's just what I need! Little fix-me-up. Better than chicken soup. Yes, yes, everything is going to be just fine…"

Notes:

Notably Chassis Wheatley's issues here can be summed up as "did I leave the human on?"