Chell climbed down from the crate she was using as a stepladder, and plonked a large, heavy, honey-coloured bowl down on the big central table.
Wheatley watched her nervously, his hands splayed on the floury tabletop. He had his placeholder grin on- the worried, darty-eyed one which meant that he had no idea what was about to happen, and was waiting for a little more input before he decided whether to be pleasantly surprised or properly alarmed.
"What're you doing?"
"We," she said, stressing the word and hefting a two-pound sack of flour onto the tabletop, "are making bread."
"Umm... alright then, uh... why, if you don't mind me asking?"
She paused, and looked at him. He scrambled to backtrack.
"I- I mean, okay, fair enough you doing it, but why me? It's not like I'm a- a making-bread-expert, that's you, you've clearly got all the expertise you need in that area right there in that devilishly clever little brain of yours. Not really going to bring much to the table, metaphorically- or, indeed, literally speaking, I do not have anything to put on this table, although," he added, trying to scrub the flour off his hands with the trailing end of the sofa throw, "I do seem to be taking a fair amount away from it, which is a bit alarming. Fair amount of this sort of... white powdery stuff, seems to be a bit clingy. Um, also, you might have forgotten- understandable, what with me looking all human now and everything- but 'looking', um, 'looking' is still the key word there. I'm not ac- I don't have any of the, er, the requisite equipment. I don't actually eat."
"Fine," said Chell, fetching a jar of yeast from the cold store. She was wearing her old jeans today, the ones she'd been wearing in the facility. They looked somewhat the worse for wear, but she'd beaten the blood and machine oil out of the worn fabric, and she liked them too much to admit defeat. She'd been up bright and early that morning, had left the house long before he'd taken his becoming-something-of-a-habit morning dive off the couch. "You don't have to help."
Help. The effect of this single word was immediate. Wheatley stopped edging from foot to foot, his fidgeting slowed, and Chell could almost see the circuits buzzing away in his head. His eyes brightened behind the glasses, uncannily like the way his optic had flared whenever he'd been psyching up to try and hack something for her, that same hopeful, tentative assumption of responsibility. It was exactly what she'd been counting on. She knew that it was fairly easy to force him to do things- he was about as resistant to threats as a cobweb was to a sandblaster- but if she could induce the same level of motivation, just by saying help...
"Well, hang on, there's no need to put it like that. I mean, I suppose I could give it a go- I've not got anything else on this morning, as it happens- or... any morning, really, itinerary; more or less blank for the foreseeable future, actually, there are not exactly many demands on my time, so... yes. All yours. What can I do?"
He started to lean casually on the table, remembered in the nick of time about all the flour, and settled for leaning casually on the back of the wicker chair, instead.
Chell unrolled the top of the sack of flour, dumping the contents into the bowl. A big mushroom-cloud puff of whiteness rose up into the air, wavered in the sunny front-room light, then drifted sideways with unnatural speed and spread across Wheatley's front. He yelped and stumbled back, swiping at it, sending little eddies of flour dust swirling through the air. As Chell watched, startled, he ran out of backing-up room and hit the wall with a thump that rattled all the bottles on the little shelves, jars of herbs and seeds jingling against each other like chattering teeth.
"Aah! It's alive, it's alive! Get off! Get it off me!"
Chell closed her eyes and massaged the dark smudges beneath them with her thumb and forefinger. Not exactly a great start.
