Title: Stars From a Distance
Summary: Inside her head, Chell still hears voices reminding her of escaping, and outer space, and artificial intelligence. Outside, Remy's is reminding her that the tea's gone cold.
Rating: PG
Characters: Chell (post-P2 character introspective fic)
Words: 6k
Notes: I still haven't finished Half-Life 2, so please forgive any incorrect canon re: the Combine or this universe post-invasion.

There are meteor showers in the spring. Something about the radiation thinning the atmosphere, preventing foreign objects from burning up as they fall to earth, Remy tells her. They watch tiny bright lights explode hundreds of miles above their heads from their rooftop, and Chell considers, briefly, if Wheatley might be one of them, in between wondering if Remy might lean her head on her shoulder and what they'll have for dinner. Later, she won't remember thinking about him at all.

The wheat turns to corn, which turns to potatoes, and then a long road of shrubbery and weeds. But that there is life, and a road at all, keeps adrenaline strong for three days, before fatigue and hunger start to overshadow the triumph of escape.

Are you trying to escape? Things have changed since the last time you left the building. What's going on out there will make you wish you were back in here.

She hadn't let herself think about the surface beyond a broad definition of the word goal while underground; the second on the list for the longest time, just below survive. There hadn't been need for much else, due largely to GLaDOS's adrenal vapor. Nutrients and modafinil mixed with the very air she breathed — and privately, she suspects anesthetic as well, to keep her numbly testing, like a good subject, like a machine, until her body dropped. If she was good, she'd survive. If she was good, she'd last. Everything she could ever want.

Aperture Science will tend to your every need, Cave Johnson had boomed at her proudly in the bowels of the earth. Food, oxygen, exercise, there's a pool somewhere in Shaft 7 — this facility's built to last through anything! You think Black Mesa's got a hideout that doubles as a nuclear explosion shelter? Let me tell ya, and those schmucks at the NY Times can quote me on this: if the sun implodes, we'll be doing science down here for millennia while they're figuring their bombs from their bunsen burners, HAH!

It was all too easy to envision Johnson within Aperture with Caroline at his side, barking instructions to staff and subjects alike, hunkering down against whatever was outside with the excuse of focusing on forwarding humankind, on technology, innovation, on creation. Even easier to imagine him down there still, wandering the offices, clutching his microphone, ordering the empty hallways to get back to work — all too easy, which is precisely why Chell doesn't let herself do so.

Caroline is still there. She'd make sure he'd have everything he needed. Built to last. Outliving even her creators.

(I would've done the same, you know. In case you were wondering. You're my best test subject. Sorry, did I say best? I meant most durable. Just curious, but what are your thoughts on human cloning?)

The barns she passes are long deserted, ravaged for any possible edibles or tools. That there had been scavengers at some point at all is not comforting; they might have lived centuries ago. And if they are still, it means competition.

I have an infinite capacity for knowledge, and even I'm not sure what's going on outside.

But nothing is outside, nothing but vegetation and light (the sun) and now Chell, alone, singular, without even the gun for posterity.

Which is for the best, really. She has enough to carry already. She refuses to weigh herself down with anything more.

Five days (days) after being expelled from Aperture Science, Chell spies the sign in the distance, and an hour later, finds herself on the outskirts of the town.

You didn't think you were the first, did you? Fifth — no, I lie, sixth! Perhaps it's better to leave it to your imagination what happened to the other five.

She doesn't have to imagine. His surprise at noticing she'd found the portal gun, the flippancy with which he'd politely informed her he'd bury her body in an hour if she didn't come crawling back out of the hole of Aperture's crumbling testing grounds, are enough clues to guess what had happened to the others.

She doesn't wonder how it happened. If it was quick; an unlucky bullet from a turret? If it was slow; a drowning in the bubbling, deadly sludge of Aperture's toxic waste? If their deaths burned long and hard; a laser cooking them alive? And she doesn't let herself wonder if he had been there to witness any of them.

She most certainly does not wonder if he would have reacted similarly if she had died in any of his numerous clumsy attempts at murdering her. He wasn't like GLaDOS; she would have disposed of her body — any body — clinically, cleanly, by dumping it into the incinerator and moving onto the next subject, the next test, the next step, For Science. Wheatley had been a child playing hide-and-seek — if he had succeeded in his final hours, would he realize the enormity of what he had done? Would he have cared, faced with her dead body, still locked into the chassis that steered his mood and temper?

Would GLaDOS?

Her name is Chell, she manages to communicate, before collapsing. The older gentleman that had spotted her from his front porch brings her to the wooden front steps of his creaking chalet, and then turns and yells through the door for Remy.

Remy turns out to be his granddaughter, who panics and asks frantic questions about the half-dead woman on their doorstep, where'd she come from, I've never seen her before, shit the phone is down again, let me get Monkey.

Monkey is a Shetland sheepdog; she recognizes the breed immediately, but she didn't know how she knows that. And the list of things she does not know is long, overwhelmingly so, and all the exhaustion she's been bottling up hits her at once, so she clutches the railing to the stairs and slides to the ground.

What's wrong with her? Can she talk? Christ, she's burning up.

Just get Edith yourself, would you?

Monk can run faster than me, I pinned a note to his collar —

Their voices are very loud, louder than her own thoughts. Louder than the others, undiluted by a speaker or artificial modifier.

Hi, er — Chell, Remy's voice says in her ear. How does she know her name? She's crouching down to meet her eyeline. A cool hand, the color of her own, is on her forehead and Remy's eyes are very blue. I sent the dog to get Edith, she's our doctor. Are you okay?

What she does let herself wonder, occasionally, is what would have happened, if.

What kind of life — for lack of a more appropriate term — he would have had if they had made it to the surface together, as planned. What kind of cohabitate lifestyle they would have shared, he a talkative artificial intelligence engineered for nonessential functions of a now-abandoned facility, and she a mute woman with a jumpsuit, somehow alive out of sheer stubbornness, both of them out of their time and space.

She wonders what GLaDOS would have done if she had refused to leave, simply refused to move, after she saved her life. Half-dead and delirious with near-asphyxiation, she wouldn't have had the energy to draw up a glare, much less resist the computer's omnipotent facility programming, but she revisits these thoughts after she's had time to stew on them and grow curious, and then slowly, irritated.

Wondering about any of it is pointless, but she does it anyway.

But she doesn't think about where they are now: chained to a dying facility kilometers below ground, conducting and reconstructing tests for rotting scientists that will never review the results; alone orbiting rocks and shadows until Aperture's internal core batteries run out, or perhaps until his atoms expire and the sun burns up.

She's above ground, below outer space, sheltered, and regularly eating; already a vast improvement from her situation a year ago, and leaps and bounds higher compared to the personalities — she refuses to think of them as people — she's spent most of her company with since awakening in the relaxation facility, and the cryosleep hub before then. From before she can remember. She's fine.

He damn near forgot his name ages ago, with no family or friends to remind him, and raising his granddaughter alone had renamed him Papik, and so that's what Chell calls him too. Virus, he explains, that swept across the land a few decades ago, destroying most of what humanity had managed to rebuild since the Combine.

(Chell wants to know about the Combine, too, but she still has so much to learn, wants them to think her competent — wants to prove to them that she could make it with the humans — so she doesn't ask anything at all.)

The family had fled New Delta, and then he'd lost Anahita. His son and daughter-in-law followed shortly after, the last symptoms of the plague, leaving Remy, and the farm.

Papik and Remy, alone for… He pauses. Twenty, twenty five years? He'd left the calendar back at the old house. He avoided anyone and everyone, locked and trapped the house against intruders and beggars alike, half expecting his infant granddaughter to break into the pox at the slightest whiff of a stranger's sweat. But she miraculously survived infancy, and then childhood, and before he knew it she was harvesting and shucking their corn for dinner. Slowly, people began to trickle by, people without the infection, older adults and very young children. Some settled down the road, and then a town had risen from the weeds. His legs had started to give, and with Remy running the schoolhouse at the town square, they relocated. With no offers to take up the crops, they left the farmhouse for good.

Chell has sensed curiosity in Remy from the moment she spied her on their doorstep, suspecting she wants her enigmatic history in exchange for theirs, but Papik doesn't rush her. He coughs and waves his granddaughter off when she offers to fetch his pillbox, and he asks Chell if she'd like another cup of Darjeeling.

Remy wants to know everything. Most desperately, Remy wants to know questions she wouldn't answer if she could — questions like Where are you from, where is your family? What exactly happened to you? And perhaps most terribly, Is there anything I can do to help?

She says she understands, of course she does, when Chell finally gets across that it's not something she can talk about, any of it. It's all over now, and it won't come back, and that's enough to be getting on with for the moment.

Remy understands. Except she doesn't. Of course she doesn't.

Oh, thank God you're all right.

Robots don't believe in higher powers. Robots use human colloquialisms because they're programmed to sound like people. They are not people. They don't have emotions. Their very existence is artificial, and so by that logic, any internal process, any parody of feeling that they express, isn't real, couldn't be. For all that happened, for all that she went through, none of them — none of it really felt a thing.

She leaves the cube in the field until three months Post Aperture, when Remy makes an offhand comment about how a footstool might be nice for Papik to put his legs up at the end of the couch, wouldn't it, if they're trying to rebuild civilization why not start inside their house? After breakfast the next day, Chell finds her feet leading her not to the town square, but to the truck, and spends the morning meandering northeast, back to the wheat field that she hasn't seen or thought about since trudging her way across it that first afternoon, half-blinded by the sun. Fifty-six miles had taken her five days to navigate and just three and a half hours to find again in the truck.

The companion cube is still sitting there, filthy and charred from the elements and its time in the incinerator but relatively untouched, still structurally sound, and for a moment she has a thought — just a thought, and just for a moment — that it's been waiting for her to come back.

Which is ludicrous, because it isn't sentient, and she has to quit this habit of personifying inanimate objects, and nothing from that damned place would ever reach her again, she won't let it. But — just a moment — it'd seemed real, like a thread she hasn't cut loose, before she brushes off the dirt and dumps it in the pickup, drives through the field, down the road, into the town, carries it to their front door, up the stairs, next to their couch. One footstool.

She tugs a dusty spare couch cover over the hearts.

Papik huffs, incredulous, but doesn't question it beyond a muttered Where'd this come from? which Chell doesn't feel needs an answer.

Is Chell even her real name? What had her file said? "REDACTED" couldn't have been it. Her artificial supervisor wouldn't have settled for knowing anything less than everything about the one that beat the system, the test subject that won.

GLaDOS is a liar, but maybe her parents had been with her in Aperture, once upon a time. She holds no illusions that they might be there still, at least not in any way she might recognize or hope to reunite with — but there exists the possibility, the seed had been planted, and now she'd brought it out with her, and all she can think about is what's back inside.

Our family way back were zoologists, Remy says after the schoolhouse lets out for the day. Chell has brought her lunch and ended up staying for the afternoon, helping the kids with their times tables. The thirty-three students Remy cares for, six to fourteen, are running home to their families across the dirt roads.

Or that's what Papik tells me, because that's what his parents told him, and so on, she says, exhaling smoke. Maybe he made it up for a bedtime story, but I believe it. We found a litter of puppies out in the potatoes when I was around seventeen. They were the first living animals I'd seen besides the birds and the bugs, y'know? I couldn't let them go. We found the mother's corpse a few days later. Just two made it. Papik named the first Angel, and I named Monkey 'cause I saw a picture of one in a book once and always wanted one. I was always into animals. I kept bringing home raccoons and mice until once I got sick from rabies, from Angel. She was always more outdoorsy than Monk, she'd disappear to play with foxes or whatever and then one day she just jumped on me. Papik wrestled her outside and put her down on our back porch, then locked Monk in the basement, to make sure. I barely remember this, but he says I nearly died, again. We were damn lucky Edith had just settled down the road with a truck full of medicine and shit she'd stolen from an old lab out in Iron Mountain.

Eight-year-old Amber comes running back across the field, and Remy quickly stomps on her cigarette. Amber forgot her lucky pencil. She needs it to do her homework.

Chell steps back into the schoolhouse to fetch it, Remy squatting on the steps outside with her pupil, when she hears Wheatley for the first time in a week.

Bring your daughter to work day… that did not end well. I'm guessing this wasn't one of the scientist's children…

Amber's pencil is star-patterned with a red rubber heart for an eraser. It's faded, so now it's a scrubbed, grubby pink. A pink heart. Chell grips the tip when she delivers it to its owner.

Most of the older folks are gone or leaving, Remy says when Amber's run off again, thanksmissremy thanksmisschell. And then there's my generation, the ones they kept alive. Some of 'em had kids already, as you've noticed. I dunno if they're trying to make this town something it isn't or they're just lonely or what. Seems almost unfair, we don't even know what the world'll be next month, much less by the time they grow up.

Why do I have a feeling like this is only temporary? Remy says suddenly. I've always had it. I have it even more now since you arrived. I've always felt like there's something else that's gonna happen, the other shoe's gonna drop when we least expect it, and then we'll really be fucked, right? We get aliens, we get a war, we get a plague, somehow we're still here, but the universe is gonna keep trying. What's next on the list, y'know? There's no, "and then they lived happily and had to start civilization from scratch but still happily, relatively."

And then you showed up. You dangerous, mute lunatic.

We're doing okay now, and all, but what next?

Is her ally still down there? Did they ever make it out? Did they escape centuries ago, while she was trapped in suspension? Did they follow her to the surface? What was their name? How long were they following her? Why did they paint the murals on the wall? How did they know which way to escape? How many other test subjects, how many other trial runs did they need before she succeeded? How come they never showed themselves? How come? How —

Papik's legs get worse; he resettles to the first floor. Chell brings his things downstairs and settles him in the parlor. And his throat always feels scratchy in autumn, they reassure her, it's fine.

Edith needs a hand at her clinic. Too many young children being raised by aging grandparents results in too many skinned knees, fractured limbs, and failing organs than she can keep track of.

It was that bloody pox, she tells Chell as her dark hands stitch up impatient seven-year-old Mathias's elbow. And I mean that literally — coughing up blood, blood in the urine, cuts not healing, adults and teens alike. You'd think the rugrats and the elderly would be the first to go when disease hits, wouldn't you? Not sure what was in it, but it was airborne, and it took out damn near everyone capable of rebuilding society. Hold still, Matty. Oldest I seen survive was fourteen, but he died last year, out in the field from heatstroke, like you damn near did. Matty, sit still.

Mathias, antsy from the needle and calling for his grandmother, calms under Chell's firm hands and steady gaze. She distracts him with seven multiplied by four, and lets him use her fingers to count.

I c'n help Popo plant the seeds after I learn numbers, he says proudly as Edith carefully bandages the stitches, and hands him the last piece of taffy in the jar for sitting tight. She'll say "Waisun, you can put them in that row, I'll do this row." She'll give me a buncha seeds and I'll count 'em out and do them in rows. So she wants me t'learn numbers, so I can do the maths right. She says Ma woulda taught me but Ma's gone now. I was in that room over there last time I saw her, it was a long time ago and I was real l'il. There weren't so many beds and you weren't here yet Misschell. Are you gonna help us with lessons again tomorra?

Thanks, Edith says gruffly after he's gone, hopping on the path stones around the back of the clinic, gripping his grandmother's hand tight. Might find a use for you around here.

She doesn't fall into a routine, but her days become familiar, sedentary. When she finds her finger itching for the trigger again, and her heels position, ready to bounce away in the boots she'd stuffed underneath the floorboards the day she arrived, she goes running, and doesn't stop until Monkey catches up and leads her back.

There's a small flu outbreak in autumn. Edith is averaging four hours of sleep a night, scrubbing the clinic and patients of germs thrice over, out of paranoia that the pox has returned. Chell spends her days running to and from houses across town to avoid risk of contaminating the truck, quarantining patients from their families, young and old alike. Remy holds sleepovers for the healthy children at the schoolhouse, distracting their questions with games teaching them to recognize edible plants, and team-building tents with bits of old canvas. Just in case.

Chell returns to Edith in the evening after wrestling spry twins Darien and Bethan into bed in their abode over their hardware store and nearly shoving sleep medication down their throats. The doctor is surprised to see her still walking, but Chell shakes her head no, her feet don't hurt, she's fine.

You sure you don't want anything?

Another shake.

No food or nothing? Carver brought over chowder.

She swallows down a bowlful because she'd hardly tasted the dish Papik had made that morning of beans, olive oil, cumin, and egg.

(Fool medammas, he'd called it, culturally diluted but as close to it as they might get again. Do you like it?

And she had liked it, very much, only she could barely taste the seasoning and spent the meal wondering if They had modified her taste buds, too, for whatever unknowable reason that might forward Science. But it was better than vapor and rotting potatoes, and so it's the second best thing she's ever had, right behind the first meal of braised rabbit and potatoes that Papik and Edith had cooked for her when she'd appeared out of the ground.)

Take my jacket home, Edith says now as they eat over the heater, pointing her spoon to her worn wool coat hanging over the door. You've got a long hike back and my van's outta fuel. I'll be staying with the Costas tonight.

Chell has realized, over time, that she doesn't feel extreme temperatures, can't remember the last time she felt hot or cold. Even the incinerator Below had felt only moderately warm, though her internal terror at her tormentor reawakening had all but numbed her to the heat at the time. Had they done something to her, or is this a result of nerve damage due to years spent in suspended sleep? Is her genetic code the same as when she first stepped inside that facility? Does it matter?

After splashing water in the bowls and leaving them to dry, she wraps herself in Edith's coat anyway and sits on the front porch step for a long time. The night is cloudy and without stars; the moon offers only a dull, muted glow. It's quiet, the only light from the single blinding bulb illuminating the porch and yard through the clinic window. Inside, the medic is calming the family of five inside that have been struck with the virus, each divided by cots in the back room separated by partitions, isolated from each other, like test tubes. Chell had put the smallest to bed earlier that morning and drew the partition curtain herself, blocking her view of her mother, and told herself not to think of him, counting test subjects, waking up the humans on a failing schedule, keeping them divided for health and safety, and putting them back to sleep, for their own good.

She heads down the path toward the town square, trusting her feet in the dark. The bulb's orange glow behind her fades and eventually clicks off; where the town square would normally light up in the evening, she spies only three lights in the distance on her left that tells her Olive and Carver are still awake, keeping their eatery open late in the possibility that someone might stop by, for food or company. Chell imagines them inside together playing cards, late into the night, and briefly considers joining them. The homes that surround the clinic are silent, lights off, inhabitants sleeping to combat the disease, which may hang in the air, in your neighbor's lungs, in your brother's, or your own. And yet… and yet. Chell feels fine.

I'm being serious. I think there's something really wrong with me.

In the dark, it feels as though this might be it, the only life in the world can be found within this small radius, and could all be extinguished as quickly and neatly as the bulb behind her. Maybe they wouldn't feel a thing. Maybe She would be merciful.

Chell doesn't know what loneliness feels like, has been alone since before she can remember, but she imagines it feels like this.

This feels like Below.

And whose fault do you think it's going to be when the management comes down here and finds ten thousand flipping vegetables?

That idiot doesn't know what he's doing up there.

If anyone asks, tell them as far as you know… everyone looked pretty much alive.

What do you have to lose? You're going to die either way.

The Enrichment Center reminds you that although circumstances may appear bleak, you are not alone. All Aperture Science personality constructs will remain functional in apocalyptic, low power environments of as few as 1.1 volts.

When she gets back, a Papik is reading by candlelight in the den, feet propped up comfortably on the cube. He's made dinner for her and kept it warm by the heater. He calls out to her in greeting, coughing halfway through her name.

Wheatley, alone in space, losing battery. Is he yelling at nothing, still cursing her name, furious at her for cheating death? Is he circling the moon in a perpetual orbit, or hurtling farther still, somewhere beyond Earth's awareness? Has he already been struck by a meteoroid, blown to dust? Would the engineers, working in an underground facility, have the forethought to make its technology solar-powered? How long can you survive off your management rail? Will you still hate Aperture's final test subject long after her sixty years are up?

GLaDOS, alone underground, watching the two bots she'd created tumble through impossible test chambers, berating their performance, starting all over again. Are there any functioning personalities still left in the facility that she didn't create from scratch herself? Has she already grown bored of the repetition? Does she still relive her death? Which is better for your testing, homo sapiens or artificial intelligence? Do you care? Does Caroline?

(Caroline. exe Not Found. Please run your Search again.)

It's taken nearly six months before she's stopped bumping into doorframes. Her index finger still curls by reflex, aiming at large patches of white drywall when she turns corners, and her eyes scan every new room for exits and threats to her health, and now theirs.

Chell doesn't know what it feels like to be a robot, but she still isn't quite sure how to be human, either.

…What, are you still alive?

Papik leaves in the third week of winter.

That's how Remy tells her, when she comes upstairs to Chell's mattress in the attic. Leaves, like a trip, like he's coming back.

They used to have all these other words for death, she says. Like "passes." I don't know what that means. Now we just say "leaves." We used to bury all of the dead too, but then there got too many to count, and people got weak or didn't have time, so you'll just find bones here and there. And then you had some real sickos who — well. But I don't want that for him. Will you help?

Chell is stronger than she looks, and she digs a deep trench after dinner. She finishes earlier than expected, and steps back inside to inform her housemate when she hears an odd, breathy noise from the bathroom. The door is unlocked. Remy is crying.

Chell wraps the body in a sheet herself.

You never caught me. I told you I could DIE falling off that rail, and you didn't catch me. YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY.

The others have arrived by the time Remy exits the house. Edith, well used to death, says few words. Carver and Olive bring a dozen candles from their store, all they could afford to offer. Several of the children who know the friendly old gentleman who lived at the edge of town huddle around Remy's legs in a tangled hug of tiny limbs. They stay quiet throughout the evening, and it occurs to Chell that they are used to death, likely know more of humanity than she does or ever will.

There's meant to be a dinner, like a "pot luck" (a word Olive had learned from her grandparents' old books) from, but the snow starts as Chell begins shoveling the dirt. The mourners depart quickly, anxious to reach home before a snowstorm pick up, leaving Chell, Remy, an empty house, and a table of food. Meat and dairy from the farms, bread from the eatery, spirits courtesy of Edith. Enough for a tableful of mourners to splurge; between the two of them, enough to last.

It's already a worse winter than last year, Remy tells her as they sit on the counter eating Vic-from-down-the-road's mince pies, so it's good he won't be here to suffer through it.

She's worried about the kids in the snow, so she's canceled school, a little treat. Don't want the flu coming back, so it's just the two of them for a while, huddled against the weather and everything else, and then they'll see. They'll see.

Chell moves downstairs, unasked. Remy needs the company.

For a Sheltie, Monk is abnormally used to staying indoors for long periods of time. He curls up in their laps and lays on their mattresses, which they've shoved up against the heater and piled high with blankets.

Chell learns how to play cards, and Remy learns how to build. They clean, rearrange the furniture, take care of the old house, strip off the couch covers for their bedding. They test the malfunctioning radio every day for a new signal and Chell spends a day inside the chimney; when she crawls out, smeared with soot and feathers, the house has its first roaring fire for the first time in years.

There are several items on the list of things they Do Not Talk About, which has been dominated by Chell's history for the longest time in their acquaintance. Chell learns that Papik is now on the list, when Remy furiously retreats to her room after Chell moves his things to make room for the couches shoved together and tosses the cube into the basement, now unable to look at it for another reason entirely. Now, she mentally adds to that list Papik's room and things, which still lie across the living room as if he'd only gone out for a breath of fresh air.

Remy says she doesn't want to talk, that she needs space for a few days to get over the death of her only family, which turns into weeks. Chell doesn't hear her voice, or Papik's, or any of them, really, for a while.

The snow is piled thick outside the house, risen up to her waist outside the door. There's no point to shoveling it with the wind howling, but she needs something to do, so she spends the day outdoors and lets Monkey run around the yard, chasing clouds of white drifts into the air.

She stops when the snow turns yellow-orange; the sun is setting, and she's shoveled a path from the door to the road. Maybe tomorrow she'll reach the neighbors and check in with them. She wonders if they ever learned her name.

Remy is waiting for her in the doorway when she stomps back with Monkey, both shivering and damp despite their thick coats. Chell has never been lectured before in her life, but she looks near about to, before her housemate yanks her inside and wraps her in an embrace.

A hug. This is what humans — people — do to show affection. Have you never had one?

Has she?

Remy doesn't say anything, still, and her face is wet again when she pulls back, but she squeezes feeling back into her fingers and pulls her inside.

And when spring comes, the meteors fall to earth.

Remy brings out the blankets. Let's climb up to the roof and have a picnic. See I don't have to play pretend like the rest of these old world things, I actually do know how to have a picnic, we did it all the time at the farm.

So they crawl out the window of Papik's old room (untouched, dusty, but neither say a word) and Chell grabs Remy's hand when she nearly slips on the drainpipe. Privately, she's a bit proud, perhaps inappropriately so, that of all things that have refused to leave her, at least her balance has been one of them.

Dinner is sourdough bread from Carver and Olive's with pork jerky and cheese from Matty's grandmother's animals. When Remy compliments the spices in the meat, Chell thinks she can taste what she means.

They're opening the bottles from Papik's funeral when they realize that the stars getting brighter aren't stars at all, and their attention turns to the meteors.

They're too far to feel or see the impact as the space rocks come crashing to earth. They count four that make it close enough to pinpoint an approximate distance, and then guess how long you would have to drive, how long you would have to run to reach it. Why don't they?

I'm thinking about going, Remy says suddenly. Not like that. The proper way, like people our age used to. You know, not now, but eventually, when the kids don't need me anymore. If people don't start coming by again. I was just gonna take the truck and start driving one day, but he got too sick to leave, and I couldn't do that to my only family. And then you came, and I like having company my own age. It's good to have someone around the house. All the others already have someone, or kids, or they're too attached to their patch of dirt, or whatever. But what about you?

Alcohol and nicotine make Remy sleepy and talkative so Chell takes the last bottle for herself, and she doesn't mind.

We get travelers sometimes. A trader just before you came, he'd been on the road his whole life and told us they're starting to rebuild some of the Old Cities. Chicago I know for sure, but last I heard it was overrun with those gross three-legged hopper things, I don't fancy that. And I don't see either of us driving to whatever New York they're rebuilding, do you? The upper hemisphere of the planet's still freezing. What do you think of the south? It's typical, everybody heads south eventually, I know. But I saw a picture of Old New Orleans once. Monkey would like the water…

The thought of heat, even if she's unsure her nerves will even register the sensation, is oddly appealing. And when Remy does end up dozing off on her shoulder, Chell feels as warm as she did last winter, as the day she collapsed of heat stroke on the front porch, as the day she woke from suspension, but this feels better, somehow.

Chell tracks one meteor as it crosses the sky, blazing a path against the stars. It grows larger, brighter, and she's expecting it to burst into rocks and flame any moment like the others, but then it shrinks and curves away, barely leaving residue. It's caught a glimpse of earth's atmosphere and decided against, headed somewhere else, somewhere Out. Within minutes of arriving it's gone again.

Maybe her genetic code is categorically different from "human" now, changed by centuries of foreign invasion and human evolution, but it's hard to care, suddenly, that she can't taste things the same, or her nerves don't work quite right. That she can feel at all seems enough to distinguish herself from his steel casing, or her cold, illuminating eye.

She's not in space anymore. She can still pull herself out of Aperture. She can still fix this.

You know what? …You win. Just go.

She's counting on it.