Portal 3

Echoes

This Chapter is particularly dark and deals with disturbing themes.

Suddenly, everything became so much darker. The air seemed to become chilled. It was like being inside a closed refrigerator. Wheatley thought that the cool and the lowered light level would be sanctuary - but it was not. Maybe there could have been a buffer zone between the roaring heat and the stoney cold. This was much more dire to him than imminent melting. Yet still, he peered around and switching his built-in light on, listening. There was nothing. No sounds came to his auditory processors. Nothing moving, not a slight noise.

The room was straight and rectangular, with walkways stretching throughout, over dizzying falls. At the far end, sitting just inside the range of his rendering, was a spiralling staircase. It was thin and metallic, just like the rest of the walkways. There was also another direction he could head in, but he quickly recognised the door at the end of it.

Wheatley really didn't want to go there.

Instead, he headed over to the staircase and winded his way up. At the very top, the walkway continued and led directly to another door. He hovered over and tried the handle. The door didn't open. He tried it again. Still, it didn't open. Obviously, the door was locked; maybe even swollen in its frame. It would take a battering ram to bash it down, and Wheatley didn't have one of those handy. He gazed around, not about to give up just yet. There were only the regular walls, stuffed with asbestos, around him. Nothing that could properly hold a portal. Also, there were no windows - which possibly would be broken from neglect - which he might be able to aim a portal onto the other side.

This was hopeless. But the other door back down the staircase would probably be unlocked. Although, that didn't change the fact that Wheatley didn't want to head through there.

Wheatley pushed the door open, to reveal a rectangular room with beige desks arranged as efficiently as possible. This room was practically the standard for Aperture's administrative offices - where its crew desperately tried to cover up the insurance fraud and extremely unethical lack of safety standards. He hated this room, but the rooms ahead were the ones he hated more. Simply despised.

At the direct opposite end of the room was the door that continued down this dismal path. Part of him wanted to turn around and find some other way. But he knew that was hopeless. So, he continued on, floating along the aisle between the desks. A brighter colour stood out in the darkness, which he spotted easily. It was red - the single most obvious colour in the spectrum. Long ago, someone had written it, using what appeared to be chalk; two very distinct words. Help me!

The "e" in sentence trailed along, with scratches, that indicated the author had been dragged whilst writing.

He remembered that day: when he was writing that before being painfully dragged into the next room.

From somewhere, although he wasn't sure where, Wheatley heard his own voice. It was faintly speaking, and he couldn't hear it properly, or figure out the words. It still chilled him to his wires - even more so than the cold air around him.

More slowly this time, he nudged the door open.

Wheatley desperately dispised this one room anymore than any other room in the entirety of the facility. More than the sweltering blaze of the incinerator, more than the frigid cryogenic refrigeration, more than the tiny bluish box and much more than the Central AI housing room. For this is where his nightmares began.

His own voice echoed from the walls, "Please, no! Please, NO!"

The walls are lined with weapons. Baseball bats, whips and tasers with varying designs for slightly different purposes. Yet the one thing that drew his attention the most was the device directly opposite. It was a large machine - now stilled, rusted and being nibbled by ivy. The machine was an oddly shaped thing, unlike anything else invented. It had a slab for a surface at its base, sided by two bulky squared pillars that taper inwards at the top. These pillars stabilise and guide another slab, one with a sturdy pole attached.