All That Makes Us Human

Introduction

Aperture Science.

There could be many many words to describe it. Words that had been thought over again and again, being turned over again and again by weary tired processors until they burned out, one by one, leaving the poor mechanical "life" flailing for a few seconds before falling limp and becoming mere hunks of scrap metal.

Aperture was rotting, dying. It's god had been destroyed and become nothing but expensive broken equipment laying on the ground, mostly destroyed and cables gradually being eaten away at, fires and electrical sparks having been extinguished by the words of passing time.

The facility's perfectly clinical airtight world had been tested by time and was failing gradually. Various plants and small species of animals were beginning to penetrate the facility's panels and grew wherever light shone in from the other world above.

If you weren't a bird or a plant, then you would have felt very trapped. You would have felt an unbearable lust for the light soaked world above, where the sun shone over every surface it could reach and gently caressed the land it watched over. The facility had no music, no rhythm. It barely had any sound other than the occasional squawk of a crow or breeze swooping down in curiosity from the world above, a hopeful pioneer to dive down into the seemingly endless darkened depths below.

"Rust" was one word that one unfortunate resident of the facility was tossing around in their processor, analysing it from all angles, each definition, each consonant, each syllable that would have rolled off a human tongue somewhere.

This resident was unlike the others. For a start, it wasn't a bird. It wasn't a plant either. It wasn't alive. It was mechanical, although whenever other talking sentient beings were around, it'd probably prefer to be called a 'he'.

The resident was an Aperture Science Personality Core.

He had forgotten his name, although he knew the following things about himself: 1. He was a personality sphere. 2. He had a bright blue round optic, consisting of small tessellating hexagons getting lighter towards the centre. 3. He appeared to be British. 4. He appeared to be able to percieve emotions, unlike most other cores he'd talk to when they were still around. 5. He was now alone.

The blue eyed core went about his incredibly mundane days by wandering and exploring the decaying cold facility on an intricate web of rails that snaked through the facility's seemingly endless corridors that slowly rusted away with no one to ever see them.

The core liked to spend the time exploring to see if anything had decayed away, anything at all that could lead him to somewhere else in the facility that could be explored and mapped out in his head. Nothing had changed for ages.

His vision had an overlay that he could look through, telling him details that would have been important at some point, such as processing, disk space, RAM usage, etcetera. There was also the date, however. The date had become glitched a very, very long time ago. It read "12/31/9999" before being followed by an incomprehensible string of garbage data.

The core slid along his rail, before hearing a distant echo of a crow from deep within the facility. Curiosity immediately took hold of him, directing his processor's thought stream to locating the always elusive source of the sound.

"Is that a bird?" He asked himself out loud, creating another echo within the dark hallway. There was no response from the moss painted darkened walls. "Of course it must be!" He replied to his own question a few seconds later, before immediately setting the servos to carry him along the hopefully pristine rail to the source.

A minute or so after a lot of zooming down the rail, the core stopped at a small birds nest that had placed itself just underneath a spot where the sun was shining down onto the contents. A bit of brave sunlight sent down by the world above to probe the dark depths below.