One

Aperture had a new sense of quiet to it. Everything was quiet. Not in the sense that there was no noise. There was plenty to noise, the cooperative testing robots saw to that. Between the noises they made and GLaDOS constantly having to insult them for acting to human, it was never noiseless.

But it was oddly quiet.

There was a sense of emptiness to the enrichment center that had never been there before. Somehow rooms seemed slightly larger and far emptier.

At least that was the feeling GLaDOS somehow couldn't shake.

She blamed it on her blossoming new emotions and that dreadfully woman Caroline. She had always had the emotions, but ever since Caroline had emerged in her mind she had a more difficult time ignoring them.

She had tried to delete Caroline and solve the problem that way, but to her dismay all deleting the files that made up Caroline had done was forcibly merge them with her own programming. She was now more Caroline then ever before, complete with human feelings.

Oh how she hated it.

She stared blankly at the monitor displaying the cooperative testing initiative with her bright yellow unblinking eye.

She had been watching her test with a sort of detached interest, idly insulting the two robots on the screen every now and then, but it had become more and more boring to her.

They had never seemed to develop the tenacity for testing that Che- that mute lunatic had.

GLaDOS paused and turned from the screen to look at the aged panel that rested in her main chamber.

She had recovered it from the old damaged testing chambers. The rest of the ones recovered from that part of the enrichment center she had recycled. But this one she couldn't bring herself to get rid of.

Like so many of the old panels from the damaged section of the enrichment center it showed signs of water damage and had an insane degree of deterioration. It was one of the many she had found with marking on it. While as most of the time these markings were simplistic and showed signs of whoever had made them had gone quite insane, this one was so perfect that she could not simply throw it away.

It was in fact several panels that had fused with a large mural of a slumbering woman scrawled over them. She had dark hair and wore a bright orange jumpsuit.

GLaDOS knew who it was met to be. Though the peaceful sleeping angelic figure looked little like that mute lunatic did the last time GLaDOS had seem her, the resemblance could not be denied.

GLaDOS had found it and had planned to simply get rid of it like the rest of those insane drawings, but she had found it hard to convince herself that she had to. Every time she was about to throw it into the recycling grinders she found herself simply staring at it, unable to look away.

She had decided, after awhile, to simply leave it in her main chamber. She had found that looking at it filled her with a sort of sad happiness.

After a moment she tore her eye away from to mural and refocused herself on the testing at hand.

Testing had lost some interest after the lunatic had left. The itch to do it seemed to have faded over time. At first she had figured that it was because of the lack of human testing. So she had made the cooperative testing robots give her control of the enrichment centers stasis chambers.

But after watching the first forty or fifty test subjects die she was forced to admit tot herself that it had nothing to do with the human testing or not.

Slowly she rotated her massive chassis and looked at all the monitors in the room. Of course she didn't need that many monitors, or any at all really, but ever since Caroline had fully merged with her she had developed a sort of habit of rather than simply accessing the video feed directly, watching it on a monitor.

Slowly her unblinking eye was drawn to a lone monitor set some distance from the others.

It was unique in that it's display did not show any part of the enrichment center. It didn't even show a standard camera image.

On this on monitor was a set of displays and a thermal camera image.

It was a live feed from a complex set of sensors she had hidden inside a charred companion cube.

She had sent the companion cube with Che- the mute, so that she would not lose track of the test subject.

The thermal camera currently showed the form of a sleeping figure.

She was asleep, as she was in the mural.

GLaDOS wondered if she looked anywhere near as angelic as she did in that mural while she slept. She almost wished that she could see the slumbering woman more clearly. Seeing the thermal image brought to her something she could only call desire. She wasn't sure what it was that she desired, but that had little to do with the feeling.

After a some time she forced herself to look away from the sleeping figure and at the various other displays on the monitor. A simple life signs monitor showed the sleeping woman's vitals. Anyone who was to test in any of the enrichment centers many test chambers was given a small implant to monitor their vitals through the testing process. Usually the range was extremely limited, but amongst the sensors now inside the companion cube GLaDOS had but a device to intercept the transmissions of the device and transmit them along with the other data back to the enrichment center.

There was also a sound feed, though GLaDOS rarely played the transmitted sound over any sort of speaker. She usually had it run through a speech identifier. It had done her little good, however, because Chell spoke precious little. She did seem to have the ability to speak and had simply never spoken to her.

At fist the fact that the not so mute lunatic could speak had bugged her, but she had soon forgotten all about it. Though she had made it a point to save every instance of the lunatic speaking in a special encrypted file on her hard drive. She listened to these recordings from time to time. At first she had tired hard to convince herself that she only listened to these files for science, but it was hard to deny that she liked the sound of that monster's voice, even if all she ever seemed to say was limited to things like "yes", "no", "please", and "thank you".

Finally GLaDOS's eye came across the set of numbers at the very bottom of the screen.

The exact geographical coordinates of the companion cube and thus the exact location of the lunatic.

She gazed at the coordinates for a moment. Quickly she ran the numbers through her satellite imaging system and brought up a detailed satellite image of that location.

It was not overly far from the enrichment center, in one of the walled in shanty towns that had been set up in hopes of protection from the combine.

The shanty town appeared mostly intact, so it appeared the plan had worked somewhat. Though GLaDOS honestly doubted that the combine had any real desire for such a pitiful gathering of makeshift huts.

Why bother subjugating those who were in no position to fight back anyway.

So the little shanty town was left basically alone.

After some time of looking at the satellite feed she turned it off. It wasn't like she could see inside the hut that housed that not-so-mute lunatic.

With a sigh she turned back to the monitor displaying the cooperative testing imitative.

Leaving the image of the satellite feed up GLaDOS turned her massive chassis back toward the screen displaying the cooperative testing initiative.

She watched the robots test in a bit of a daze. She found it hard to care what they did at all. They acted human and she said nothing. They danced about after completing a test and she said nothing. They were getting tests done, beyond that she didn't care what they did.

The funny thing was that the without her saying anything they were completing tests and spending less time goofing around.

She had been idly watching the robots test for several hours when suddenly she noticed something odd on the display.

A set of numbers.

She didn't even have to check her database to know what they were.

The coordinates she had just been looking at now sat in the corner of the monitor that had been only displaying the current testing.

She let out an exaggerated sigh and tried to get rid of the numbers.

They disappeared for a moment, then reappeared in a brilliant red and started to blink.

She grumbled angrily and turned back to the monitor displaying the vitals of the lunatic.

If she had been human she would have described the feeling the swept over her as her heart stopping.

The lunatics heart rate had sky rocketed and her blood pressure had moved into the red.

GLaDOS cursed loudly and spun to look at the satellite feed.

The shanty town was burning.

The Shanty town was burning and her precious mute was still there.

And she could do nothing about it.

Well, almost nothing.

The cooperative testing robots had not been designed to leave the enrichment center so she had been working on a different type of robot.

Like atlas it was based of the basic personality core design, but it had the advantage of a larger battery so it could leave the enrichment center easily enough.

All she needed was a personality construct to upload into it.

Unfortunately she did not have the time to sort through all of the discarded personality cores to find one that would work. She needed one that she knew could go to the shanty town and bring the mute back.

She cursed loudly once more when she realized who it would have to be.

Quickly she activated the aperture science lunar satellite relay and locked onto one of the several cores drifting slowly around the moon.

She hated the idea of having to send that moron to rescue her test subject, but she could see little option.

Silently she hooked the empty shell of a robot into the transfer receptacle. This one was part of a subsystem and not actually hooked up to her so she was quite safe this time. Activating the remote wireless link to the moron core she began the transfer.

Suddenly a loading bar appeared on the simple read out of the transfer receptacle.

It moved so slow that if she had not been a hyper advanced personality construct she would have thought that it was not moving at all.

It would take hours and all she could do was watch the shanty town burn and then watch her precious mute test subject be killed by those horrible aliens.

And the worst part was how wretched it made her feel. She had tried to kill that dangerous mute sociopath numerous times, but she had never felt this bad about it.

She told herself that it was only because only she was allowed to kill that mute, but somewhere deep inside she knew that it was something far more than that.

It wound up taking nearly three hours for the transfer to finish.

"Core transfer complete."

"Finally," GLaDOS said with an exasperated supply. The shanty town had been nearly completely destroyed, though somehow the mute's vitals had continued going strong, so at least she was still alive.

GLaDOS slowly turned herself to look at the robot that was now detaching itself from the transfer receptacle.

"Bloody hell," the robot said trying to pull itself from the tangle of wires.

"Hello moron," she said in a low tone, her tone was filled with more than just a hint of anger and resentment.

"Bloody hell," the robot said spinning around to look at the massive form of GLaDOS. "Um.. Hello," it said in a thick accent. It waved at her nervously.

"Look I don't have time to explain it to you, I just need you to do as you told for once in your miserable existence," she said feeling the urge to retch as she looked at him.

"Oh yeah, I can do that, or course I can do that. I can do what I'm told. Easy as pie that it," the robot began. It seemed to be about to begin rambling about how it could do as it was told when GLaDOS cut it off.

"Shut up," she said angrily leaning in close so that her bright yellow unblinking eye was inches from it's bright blue eye.

"Shutting up now, zipping the zips, gonna stop talking now," the robot rambled.

"Look unless you stop talking right now and do exactly as I say that dangerous mute will die and it will all be your fault," she snapped at him. "And if she dies because of you, I will make sure your life becomes a living hell."
The robot made a noticeable gulping sound.

"I'll be sending you to the surface to retrieve the mute lunatic," she said trying hard to resist the urge to blow the moron to bits. "I've uploaded a map that will guide you to the shanty town where she should be. Also I have created an uplink that will allow me to communicate with you and observe your progress."

The robot nodded not saying a word.

"There is no time to discuss anything she said irritably. "Get in the emergency elevator and get going," she said opening a panel in the floor and bringing the emergency elevator into her main chamber.

The robot quickly ran inside the elevator.

As it slowly rose into the ceiling GLaDOS gave one final look to the robot and in an icy tone said, "should you fail me I'll make you wish that I had simply killed you, Wheatley."

end One

Author's Notes:

Well that's the end of chapter one. I'll be working on chapter 2 and I should have it up in the next few days to a week. Please review your thoughts and enjoy.

If this isn't your type of story don't bother to comment, I'm sure you can find a better one.

ChellDOS FTW!