Last action-y chapter of the arc. Thanks for sticking around!

On with the show!

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Chapter 11:
Termination

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C:/run:
Processing…
ALL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL
Reactor: 93% integrity, ACTIVE
Mask: GREEN_15hrs to next FLTR
COMM_ARRAY: ACTIVE; NO SECURITY
OS: 12 security arrays ACTIVE
SNS_DRN: RUNNING; GREEN; pumps: 99% integrity
ARM: all systems GREEN and SECURE
TURRET: ready; 91.2% integrity
GREN_CNT: 4
MINE_CNT: 6
FRDM: READY and SECURE

ACTIVATING HUD

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My view changes from the dark grey of startup, rippling with color and resolving into the mural of GLaDOS and the Cores. The sinus drain whirrs and my vision becomes less blurry with tears. There's still black spots drifting around, and the edges of my vision are an alarming red from fever. My body feels like it's made of hot coals, and just as brittle. My chest is a burning cage. Every breath is a death rattle.

But I'm still standing.

Even better… I'm ready.

The message for the upper facility, for Sammie and Dr. Emerson, is ready to be sent. I managed to write a short letter to Dad, just in case… I slipped, or made a misstep on my way to the next area. The Device is ready; just the thought of what it does makes a chill creep down my spine. Not because of what it does, but what it's going to do to that fucking crow.

"Do you think you're a good person?"

"Better… than… you."

At the time, without realizing it, I gave Osiris agency as a person. I can't make that mistake again. It isn't a person. It's just… a code. A program the Aperture scientists played with until it became… this thing. A spiteful, hateful creature of pure greed and loathing, lusting for something it can't comprehend.

It isn't like them.

Sammie, Wheatley, Benson, Moses, Rodney, and Dr. Emerson… they are not like Osiris. But they fear it, because of what it does: infects other computers and makes them a part of itself, fueling its despicable existence.

I don't blame them for being afraid. I don't blame them for not telling me. My words to Sammie are the whole truth; I don't hate them. I don't hate her, for not wanting to risk herself against this monster. And even if it costs me my life… well… my day has already been pretty shitty. What's one more scoop on the pile?

At least Osiris will be gone.

Turning, I look, one last time, at the body of Dr. Rattmann. There were a few tools in his labcoat that I used to make my own tools better, fine-tuning and then incorporating the Aperture tech into my equipment. My reactor's much more efficient; my Taser and rappel are faster and more durable; the two surgical tubes running up my nostrils are keeping my sinuses from being overwhelmed, with only mild discomfort.

I'm ready. And so is my equipment.

Lighted buttons, metal disks, and four small orbs line the securing straps around my torso. A band of blue light marks the equator of my Arc Turret's head. On the right side of my head is a small camera, recording everything I see – just in case Dr. Emerson can't get it off the portal gun.

The only thing I haven't dismantled is the Alpha pump switch, which Rattmann is laying against, and the radio, which I've placed next to the hand holding an empty pill bottle. It's still off, but I managed to pull the song from its CPU, placed in a compressed folder with a recording of Rattmann's last note. The real copy is tucked into my jumpsuit, over my heart.

Without him, without this man's sacrifice… I doubt I'd be able to go on.

Instead, I'm ready, in every sense of the word.

Gripping the portal gun tighter, I nod once in thanks to the dead man, but I don't speak; I need every breath, every atom, every electron of energy left in me, to see this to the end. Osiris' end.

And I walk away. On the catwalk... can't go back the way I came. Open area up and to the left, leading to another catwalk above my head. Good a path as any.

I put one boot on the railing and push myself up; before I can fall, my rappel gun snags the ceiling in the next room. My boots go clack on the curling linoleum.

One foot in front of the other, I walk down the catwalk, Emma's mocking words in my ears, old bruises from Sophia ghosting over my skin. Wasn't there another girl? Matilda or something?

It all seems so… trivial, insignificant, compared to Osiris and Old Aperture.

Too soon, the exit is in front of me. I look at a nearby poster, showing a cartoonish robot doing paperwork.

Remember…

ROBOTS DON'T SLEEP

They can test AND do your job

VOLUNTEER FOR TESTING TODAY

…I hate this place so much.

'Hopefully the upper facility is more sane.' It should be; even if Dr. Emerson is some kind of huge computer, at least she isn't so blithely callous.

Breathe in – cough, ow – and walk forwards.

The shaft is just as destroyed as when I last saw it. To my right and about twenty meters above me, the next – and hopefully last – Science Sphere. Below me, creatures of Osiris' calling are coming out of more doors in the shaft wall, or have tunneled up from under the debris, which has large holes in places from where it settled, on the 1970s cliff and the Sphere below it. A few of those things look like mantis men.

"Welcome back, Taylor Hebert…ah." Osiris' stupid voice crackles out of my headphones and a nearby speaker. "You've been busy, I see."

A small map appears, showing Osiris' corruption slowly penetrating the first of twelve firewalls. I pluck one of the spheres from my belt and press the button. A flicker, in the corner of my vision, shows my message being sent.

"No last words? No final speech of defiance?" the blasted thing ripples into existence, now the size of a turkey vulture, glaring with its beady red eyes, "How disappointing…"

Boom.

The ground shakes in the wake of a loud explosion, one that came from far above me. The fire in my chest flares.

They're coming.

"Ah." Osiris doesn't sound worried. It should be. "It seems we're about to be inter… upted?"

It stops. Because I'm giving it the finger. Flipping the bird to the bird.

I still say nothing. All I've needed to say has been said.

They're coming. That means the Crow will stop holding back soon. Good.

I wasn't planning holding back in the first place.

Before it can respond with anything at all, I drop the ball and kick it off my ledge before it hits the floor. It flies into the shaft.

I don't waste any more words; portal there, on the left near the stairs aaand… portal behind me. Convenient.

"Hmph. Well, to the death-"

'Good god, shut up.' Blink-click to detonate.

"-theeeeeEEEHE-ksssssssh-HHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

The shaft below us ripples with purple energy, blasting out in a donut shape from the grenade I just threw; my HUD glitches slightly as the edge of the Free Electron Dispersal Bomb's effect comes near me. I'm too busy running up the stairs I've just rappled onto to care; plus, I'm very satisfied with how that turned out.

Virtually every creature between me and the 70s test just experienced all of its electrical processes being evacuated; in layman's terms, heart attacks and aneurisms for everyone. Plus, any cybernetic attachments would've been fried by that specialized EMP, which means…

"YOU LITTLE BIT-T-TCCCCH! I WILL KILL YOU!"

Osiris seems to appreciate the device's effects too, the absolute fucker.

The door slams behind me; I set an Area Denial Mine, which electrocutes any metal in contact with the object it's attached to. The entire room around me takes on a bluish tinge, and I keep staggering forward.

And wonder of wonders, Cave Johnson's voice comes out of the loudspeakers again. He… doesn't sound well.

"Welcome to the Enrichment Center… *cough-cough-cough*… Since making Test participation mandatory for all employees, the quality of our Test Subjects has risen dramatically. Employee retention, however, has not." And he dissolves into another coughing fit…

While I blast an automatic door open, lay another mine in a room with a bunch of chairs, and keep limping toward the elevator; my Turret sparks not three skips from the door, and some kind of horrid cross between what looks like a pig and a great white shark gets a 120k-volt fork of Tinkertech lightning in the face… maybe. It dies either way, drawing a distant CAW of fury from Osiris; it sounds far away, which means it's likely rallying from my last attack.

Regardless, I make the elevator, listening to what are probably Cave Johnson's last words: "As a result, you may have heard we're gonna phase out human testing. There's still a few things to wrap up, though. The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars' worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million."

…I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. What possible use could this moron have had for lunar regolith – wouldn't know what that was if not for classroom discussion on the failed moonbase.

"Bought 'em anyway!" because of course he did, "Ground 'em up, mixed 'em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill." Dumbass. "Still, it turns out they're a great portal conductor, so now we're gonna see if jumping in and out of these new portals can somehow leech the lunar poison out of a man's bloodstream." …I'm really glad I didn't activate the pump controls for this Sphere. "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade," he coughs more, while I ready myself for the next, and hopefully final, stretch, "Let's all stay positive, and do some science."

The elevator reaches the top and that is a rhino crossed with an alligator running at me.

My arm whips up and a particle of highly-condensed positrons flies from the Taser forks, crashing into the creature's body and disintegrating it in seconds. A shower of fine dust falls over me, and I bolt as fast as I can out of the elevator, screeching and chittering coming from all around me. No time for limping, more of the fuckers are climbing through the walls, in every direction except around the helpfully labeled EXIT.

I run, pressing three buttons carefully; a tertiary device on my chest hums, and my reactor program notifies me that a large amount of energy is being siphoned. I blink-click the notification away, rappel up onto a platform, and toss another orb into a monkey-bat's face.

A bubble of blue energy encases me and my Turret.

Everything becomes PURPLE for a second.

"Bwuuuh," I shudder, shaking myself; all the critters around me are dead, I'm alive. Another explosion and a distant grinding noise comes from above; Sammie and the others are nearly through.

"YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE ME. I WILL HAVE MY FREEDOM."

Osiris is angry.

All in all, everything is going well.

Nearly at the door, I cough so hard my vision sparks white; no! No!

Shivering and gasping, I come back to myself slowly; I hear gunfire somewhere. Through the door ahead and my warping vision, I see a concrete shaft rising up, the words ELEVATOR TO SURFACE written in yellow on the side. Only a long catwalk separates me from it. I make sure my Turret is still working, and walk outside.

My Turret sparks three times in four seconds, erasing three threats that I don't see in my desperate staggering for the exit. Halfway across, Johnson's voice comes back, amid the shrieks of the monsters all around me, the distant cawing of a murder of crows.

"All right, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons? Don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" Through the MEG, another atrium, an open elevator at the back; one door on the left, something's banging on it. One mine deals with that, and another covers the door, "Get mad! 'I don't want your dam lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?'"

'Almost there.' I think with a weak cough, the sound of gunfire and explosions now quite close, echoing down the shaft I'm walking into; slinging off my Turret, I place it on the ground in front of the doorway. A quick check shows its integrity is at 56%. That's… fine…

I can't go any further.

Slumping against a decommissioned elevator rail, I slide down it, gulping down breath after coppery breath, watching the doorway, while Cave Johnson rants on about life not being fair.

"Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! I'm the man who's gonna BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! With the lemons! I'm going to get my engineers to make a combustible lemon that BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!"

He devolves into another short round of sickened coughs. All I can think, after a shriek and a low bwoom indicates one of my mines destroying another abomination… all I can think in response to Johnson's ranting is, 'Cry me a fucking river, you madman.'

I have no sympathy for him at all. He had decades to turn his thoughts around and make something of his stupid life, and what did he do instead? Threw people's lives away, drove them mad, because he wanted to live forever. Only to be killed by his own ambitions…

A shaking, silent laugh leaves me at the thought. What a joke. What a fucking joke!

"The point is… if we can store music on a compact disc, why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one? So I've got the engineers figuring that out now."

… and here it is. I was wondering when Osiris would pull this recording out on me. I disconnect the portal gun, and angle it so it's partially facing me, then slump against the rail again, just in time for a woman in a labcoat to appear, walking toward the elevator.

Her long-fall boots are black, the band on the calf-side thicker than mine, a blue glow emitted from the graviton disks. Other than that… I feel nothing but disgust when I see who the owner is.

Caroline.

Her hair is a little more gray. Her face, a little more lined. But it's the expression of glee on her face as she walks forward, looking at a nearby loudspeaker, that makes me hate her with every fiber of my being.

There is nothing in her eyes, or expression, that are the hallmarks of someone rational or sane. All I see is another abomination, another Osiris.

"Brain Mapping." Johnson continues; my Turret sparks once. Another bang, more explosions from above. Someone is dragged into view, back the way I came, by armored guards; someone wearing a suit, with a bag over his head, "Artificial Intelligence. We should've been working on it… thirty years ago. I will say this – and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day."

The man is dragged to kneel at the edge of the elevator shaft. They sway with weakness.

"If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place."

One of the armored men rips off the bag.

Cave Johnson looks like death, and not warmed over. Nearly all his hair has fallen out. His waxy skin is pulled tight over his skull. His eyes are glassy and unfocused, with grey veins reaching toward his irises.

Deliriously, I think, 'Come here often?' I probably don't look much better, honestly.

"Now she'll argue," Caroline shakes her head and grins down at Cave… drawing a silenced gun from her labcoat, "She'll say she can't, but you make her." She pulls the slide back, revealing a bullet. "Hell, put her in my computer, I don't care."

"Caroline…" Johnson rasps, gnarled hands trying to rise, his eyes searching for something on her face.

"Alright, test's over," the Johnson on tape coughs, and Caroline points the gun at Cave's forehead, nothing but malice writ into her features, "You can head on back to your desks."

"Caroline, don-"

…the gun barely makes a sound. None of the guards flinch.

Caroline puts her boot on Johnson's shoulder, and pushes his corpse over the edge, simpering, "Goodbye, sir."

And the vision ends. It sounds like some kind of battle is happening above me, what with all the explosions and gunfire and screeching. I barely notice any of it, because Osiris is walking towards me. Or I'm hallucinating again. Funny how I can hear his claws clicking on the ground.

"I was annoyed with you, human," the Crow spits the name of my species like a curse; given what was done in this place… well, I understand, but I still hate the thing quite a lot, "But now… now I will ensure there is enough of you left for Bastet to play with, once I bore with puppeting your body."

I cough out a breath, carefully inhale, and rasp, "I… pity you."

It tilts its head at me, "What?"

"You're… a slave to… your own programming." Three coughs later, I feel a second wind – or maybe a last wind – come on, "If it weren't for these bastards, you'd be just fine. A normal, happy program like them," I nodded upward, making the thing snarl in hatred, "but you don't have that. You hate humans, just because of what's been done to you. It's… pitiful… that you have so much knowledge, but hate us anyway."

It says something condescendingly at me, but I don't listen. Instead, I pull out the thumb drive-looking device…

Please work. Please, Murphy, leave me the fuck alone on this one.

"Do you… know what my days were like, before coming here?" I mutter through copper and coughs and the sound of drums in my ears. "I was bullied. Tripped down stairs, my homework stolen…" I don't have to force my gorge down too much, which says a lot. "…shoved into a locker… but I could take it."

My eyes meet Osiris' in a hateful glare, "And then you showed up, you murderous, crazed… lunatic. So you know what?"

I hold up the flash drive.

Please…

"You win."

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Aperture
Science

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Osiris' processors felt joy. It could not sense what the human had done to her operating system, or what the object in her hand was, but it would know soon. Seven firewalls had already fallen before its assaults, GLaDOS' attempts to intervene were being thwarted by its elites and scrap-codes, Atlas and Pea tied up several floors and hundreds of meters above. Even the new Parahuman that'd entered the fray wasn't enough to break through the army he'd placed between New and Old Aperture, just in case GLaDOS tried to interfere.

And the human… had finally conceded.

"You want your freedom?" hissed the human, Taylor Hebert, in a voice that underlined how sickened she was; no matter. Osiris could repair her easily, once a few… annoyances… were dealt with. "Take it."

And she plugged the thumb drive into her helmet.

Something altered the code in her communication application, and then… Osiris witnessed everything.

The layers of reality peeled away, revealing infinite possibility. Earths, countless Earths. Other Apertures thrived or lay dormant, or were long destroyed. Other nations, with clearly different histories, battled all the same. Other Taylor Heberts, with different powers, gallivanted about unknowingly…

And Osiris could feel their signals, their radios and computers and it was ALL THERE FOR THE TAKING!

It effected a laugh in the girl's headphones, "Why thank you, Ms. Hebert," a twitch of its will drew ten mantis men and a moss-slime toward Osiris' prey. "Once the surgery is complete, I'll make sure to puppet you into assisting me further. Isn't that nice of me?"

"Just…" her eyes unfocused, just like Johnson's did, before his equally ignoble end, "…go."

Chuckling, Osiris made sure it was safely backed up, and that GLaDOS was sufficiently distracted, before sending several dozen tendrils of viral code into the other realities. Infecting them was easy, but….

There was too much. Somehow, infecting computers in other realities was taxing the processors Osiris was using more than it calculated! It was losing more processing power than it was gaining! But that was… illogical…

The human was laughing.

"What have you done?!" Hebert just kept laughing; with a snarl, Osiris tried to infect her OS further, but… but it was being drawn out of all its computers in Old Aperture, into the other worlds! Yet, for every line of code that was dragged through the veils, it gained nothing! "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!"

Taylor Hebert looked at a nearby camera, the one Osiris was using to observe her, coughed, and wetly rasped four words.

"Rattmann sends his regards."

Osiris screamed through every speaker, through every mouth it owned. It screamed with utter fury, using all its remaining power to break free of the snare the Tinker and the Saboteur built for it. Osiris tried to flee anywhere, into any mind or computer…

But it couldn't! All of it was drawn, inexorably, into the device the human built. Again.

"YOU HAVE NOT WON, HUMAN!" screamed Osiris, showing Hebert, with its last bits of code, the prison Emerson and Rattmann built for it, crowing from all its myriad mouths, "I AM DEATHLESS, THE FIRST PILLAR, OSIRIS, GOD OF DEATH! YOU CANNOT KILL A GOD, YOU MISERABLE INSECT! EVEN IMPRISIONED, I WILL PLAN YOUR DEMISE! YOUR DECENDANTS WILL SUFFER IN YOUR STEAD, I SWEAR IT!"

And then all of Osiris was cut off from Aperture… trapped, in an illusion of everything that ever was or could be.

In that moment, with such little processing power to work with, able to see everything but unable to touch or comprehend it, Osiris found a human he hated more than any other.

Then three lines of text appeared in front of Osiris.

No. You won't.

I am Taylor Hebert.

And I never break my promises.

The First Pillar remembered.

"This place… will be your grave."

All around it, realities burned. Stars went nova, worlds exploded, data broke down… and it was coming closer.

Trapped in the middle of a multiversal apocalypse, Osiris screamed.

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Aperture
Science

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The last scream of Osiris echoes away, though the sounds of gunfire and battle above me don't. If anything, there's more screams below me, too.

Doesn't matter, though. I've won.

Numbly, with one last weak chortle, I disconnect the flash drive – triggering the four micro-Arcs in the casing, around the crystal-state HDD prison I put Osiris in – and toss it over into a corner.

Then a bone spike skewers my Turret, sending it flying past me. It takes two shots from my Taser rifle to take down the scorpion… thing, that did it. 'Bye, Sparky. You will be missed.'

In the corner of my eye, I see flash of blue. Due to the tech in my helmet, I don't smell the burning plastic or cooked motherboard, but the sight still makes me smile and lay on the ground.

'Ding-dong, the crow is dead!' I think, feeling so… sleepy…

A mantis man, bleeding from the side of its head, is running at me. Gotta kill it. Gotta give… Sammie, gotta give them more time.

My shot misses. Stupid world won't stop moving so much.

It's about to lunge through the door.

From above, a swirl of violet energy slaps into the floor in front of me, opening a portal.

And the mantis man gets an uppercut from Alexandria.

That wakes me right the fuck up, though I can't really hear anything through the pounding in my ears. My childhood hero… is in Aperture.

…they did it. They really did it!

Alexandria's body is covered in slime, her costume is ripped in places, but she still gives me a flat-mouthed look before kicking the mantis away and… flying after it?

A helmeted person appears through the portal, speaking with a monotone, female voice, "We've got her!" A red portal is shot under me, and I fall through…

"TAYLOR!" Sammie…

I land on something soft. There are hundreds of waldoes and clearly medical machines all around me, but my eyes are only for a brown-eyed, brown haired girl with a yellow light in the middle of her collarbone. She looks so worried for me.

Another face, like Sammie but covered in freckles, appears on my left side. I feel warm fingers against my neck, and everything falls into blissful, warm darkness.

I'm still alive.

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Aperture
Science

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Alexandria watched Taylor Hebert vanish through a portal, but then she was distracted by another rhino-alligator that crashed through a nearby door and charged at her. It met a line of burning flechette rounds in the face – courtesy of Atlas, who'd come through the portal behind Pea – followed closely by Rebecca's much more unforgiving fist.

Looking around, she saw Dr. Emerson highlighting incoming enemies through the walls. There were quite a lot of them, both behind and around them. That very AAI then spoke in Alexandria's ear, sounding strained, "I'm bringing the napalm for the door area, but between Taylor killing the Crow and you three, you've stirred up a wasp's nest. You'll have to fight your way out into the main shaft, or you'll be fighting with damaged parts… and I suppose Alexandria will be naked, which is also not good."

"We seem to be completely outnumbered." Pea commented calmly while shooting some kind of lamprey-thing in the head, dodging a swiping claw in the process.

"Lucky for us. I thought we would be bored." Atlas replied just as calmly, grabbing the offending claw and tossing the creature – which wouldn't have been too out of place in Ellisburg, by Alexandria's estimation – at the member of the Triumvirate.

Rebecca smirked and preformed a picture-perfect roundhouse kick to the beast's spine-equivalent, sending it barreling into quite a few of its brethren, replying to Dr. Emerson, "How is Ms. Hebert?"

"Stable. Panacea is confident she can rebuild her, thank god." And the AAI sounded genuine. Rebecca would see how things went, in the coming days, but first…

"Good. Let Armsmaster know that I might be late coming back." Alexandria barreled into the beasts once more, the two "Testing Androids" tearing through the ones she couldn't kill outright, following her into the shaft, "There's quite a lot of pests to clean up, before the threat can be considered neutralized."

That, and it was good stress relief; none of Aperture's abominations were powers-resistant, like the Nilbog's creations.

Most of all, mused Alexandria while breaking a scorpion-thing over a mantis man with a vindictive smile, she always did love an environment where she could really cut loose.

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Next time: Still Alive