Well peeps, Portal 2 is coming out a week from today, and I don't know about you, but I am excited as hell about it! I even went out and pre-ordered it, it's probably going to devour my life once I get it, but whatever. Anyway, I decided to do a little drabble on Wheatley, why? Because he's the most epic thing to come out of Portal since the turrets. Yes, he's even better than the Companion Cube. And he has a British accent; I am such a big sucker for a British accent. Anyway, onwards!

Click,

That was it; his internal clock had just reset exactly the 1,314,871.92nd time since he was activated three-hundred years ago. Wheatley figured that he should have done something to celebrate the occasion, the problem was there was no one to celebrate with. All of his fellow personality spheres had either been deactivated, or had been subjected to Her tests. And honestly? The rusted, flora-overgrown 1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-Colliding Super Button didn't do much for conversation… or anything for that matter. Wheatley figured that something in his circuitry must have gotten loose when he actually lowered himself down to the Button as close as the mechanical arm would allow him to and compliment the object.

"Those are some lovely new ferns you've got growing there, have you got any gardening tips for me?" Of course he got no answer, he never did, unless you counted the distant sound of crickets or cicadas (he could never tell which was which…) somewhere far from the dilapidated walls of the enrichment center. Leaving the Button behind to tend to its imaginary gardening the sphere continued on his way, endlessly gliding along the surprisingly still-smooth rails. It was times like this he wished he could disengage himself from the rails, magically sprout legs and get away from the place; of course two things stopped him from doing this.

One: Everyone had told him that disengaging from the rail would kill him on the spot. As pathetic as his existence was he didn't want to die, let alone from coming off some stupid rail. (The concept was complete bollocks in his opinion, yet he could never find it in himself to try.)

Two: Robots didn't magically sprout legs; those modifications had been done by Her, before she finally went into sleep mode about a decade or so back. And the turrets and personality spheres that had legs grafted onto them were subjected to Her tests. At first Wheatley had been jealous of the ones who had been chosen to have legs… until he saw the charred, half-melted remains of the units who had completed Her tests. After seeing such a gruesome sight, Wheatley felt more attached to his rail and robotic arm that he had in all his existence.

There was something that interested Wheatley, and that was the human female that had been put into stasis. He had tried to get her room open, but the task was impossible because for one, he had no arms, and for two, the room was locked and wouldn't open until... who even knew when? For all he knew, that lady could be in stasis for the rest of forever. (Or until the life support finally gave out. Of course, that might very well be whenever he finally deactivated; he was the one maintaining the bloody thing after all.) As he continued his now-boring route of the laboratories he wondered if maybe the lady had woken up yet… or maybe he was just desperate for some sort of living contact. Anything was better than watching the tiles on the walls finally fall off (sometimes exposing some ghastly-looking mold that the personality sphere would gag at. Well, he would, if he had a gag reflex.)

As he passed by one of the only reflective surfaces left in the facilities, he took a moment to read the words imprinted on his side panel,

Back-up GLaDOS Personality Sphere no 4,192. v 01.1

Wheatley didn't like to think himself a back-up for Her, he didn't like to think he had any connection with Her, really. More to the point, why give him a masculine voice if he was a back-up unit for a program that was supposedly female? And a British masculine voice at that? He knew that somewhere on his casing, there were tiny little words that he could just barely make out: voice provided by S. M. Wheatley. He figured that's where he got the idea in his memory banks to start introducing himself as "Wheatley." It certainly came out of his speakers easier than: "Hello, my name is Personality Sphere number four-thousand one hundred and ninety-two. Pleasure."

Giving an almost too-human sounding sigh he continued on his way… maybe checking to see if that lady had woken up from her stasis yet wouldn't be such a bad idea. What was the harm, right?

Post-story notes:

"His internal clock had reset exactly the 1,314 871.92th time since he was activated three-hundred years ago ..."

I apologize if my calculation is off, I got the answer from Google. Apparently, there is 2, 629, 743. 83 hours total in three hundred years. Divide that by two and you get the number provided in the story; since of course, twenty-four hour clocks reset at midnight. I don;t know why I made the gap between Portal 1 and 2 three hundred years, I think I read it on a game site somewhere...

"Back-up GLaDOS Personality Sphere no 4,192. v 01.1"

Based on appearances, Wheatley seems to to be one of the personality spheres that were activated at the end of Portal 1, and for the sake of testing GLaDOS probably created more, creating subjects out of her cores like ATLAS. "4,192 v 01.0" is the release date for the game in the states: 4-19-2011

"voice provided by S. M. Wheatley"

A small nod to Weatley's official voice actor; Steve Merchant. As if that wasn't obvious enough.