The aerial faith plate made its usual sound as it launched the test subject into the air, straight towards the ceiling. He closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the wind on his skin and in his hair, before opening them again and shooting a blue portal above himself and an orange one on the wall behind him. Right before he flew through it, he pushed the small red button on the wall.
The timer started, he had five seconds now.
He saw the cube fall on the hard-light bridge that just appeared above the lake of deadly goo, where he was heading right now from the orange portal. He prayed that he shot it on the right place, and that his fall wasn't going to go too far or too back.
It wasn't. Once he landed on the bridge, he quickly grabbed the cube and jumped off, a second before the bridge disappeared. Then, he let the cube go for a moment, so he could shoot a blue portal on the other side of the room and an orange one under himself, where a tiny white island of a floor-plate was about to disappear in the goo.
He hit his leg as he was going through, which drastically affected his landing on the other side.
"Woa-woaaaaah!"
Instead of going through and landing smoothly, like he usually did, he went through the portal with a tumble, which lead to him dropping the cube and hitting the wall with his forehead, while also, somehow, landing on his feet.
"Oww...fuck!" he let himself be heard, as he sat down on the floor, holding his wounded head, which was dripping blood now, just like the stain on the wall he hit. Then he remembered the cube and looked over to it, only to see it standing on its edge, dangerously close next to the goo lake.
"Nonononono!"
He quickly got up, ran up to the cube and grabbed it, hugging it with both of his arms, not realizing he had a portal gun in that moment. Right after he pulled the cube back, he remembered it, picked it up and placed it on the big red button that happened to be right next to him. The door opened.
"You know, if I wanted you to redecorate, I would've just asked..." said the robotic female voice from the speaker above him.
"Oh really? I'd like to see you do any better!" he replied, brushing the dust off himself.
"It's not my job to do any better, but I'll let you know that the test subject with the code JN022140 did a much better job in solving this test. He also didn't smash his head against the wall like you did."
"Well, I tripped, what's his excuse?" he said, making his way through the small corridor towards the elevator.
"He didn't."
As calm, serious and robotic as the voice was, the test subject couldn't help but hear a slight savour of sass in it.
"I wouldn't worry too much about it, though," she continued. "It's not like you'll ever going to meet him, anyway. What's important is, that unlike him, you're still here. Alive. And testing."
"What happened to him?" He asked. He then proceeded to tear his sleeve off the rest of the jumpsuit and wrap it around his head to stop the bleeding.
"He tried to run away," the voice chuckled. "So he ran through a room that was full of turrets. They weren't exactly lazy with their job."
"Turrets? Hold up...so technically, he ended up redecorating even more than I did, is that true?" he said, smiling to the camera as he entered the elevator.
"Yes. But I actually WANTED that room redecorated. So don't try to make yourself look less horrible."
While she was saying that sentence, the elevator door closed and the whole thing started moving down. He leaned onto the glass wall, watching everything the elevator was passing by. Pipe after pipe, turbine after turbine, wall after wall, wheel after wheel...prehaps it was both this and the wound on his forehead that was making him feel so sleepy. Figuring this elevator ride would take some time, he sat down on the floor and closed his eyes, deciding to take a nap before he gets to the next chamber.
'I wonder if it's sunny outside...' he thought to himself before he fell asleep.
For some reason, even though his earliest memories were about him waking up in the relaxation vault only a few weeks ago, meaning he never actually saw the sun itself, he felt like he missed it. He couldn't help but feel a pleasant, familiar feeling when he got into a contact with the hard-light bridges in test chambers.
That robo-lady, who was watching over him all the time, said it's because humans used to live on the surface, before they destroyed it and spread radioactivity everywhere, therefore human brain has a positive response to the sunlight, even if the human was made artificially with combinations of different DNA's...like he was, appearantly.
Still, he couldn't help but feel that something just wasn't right here. That he was, or at least used to be, something more than a someone in a jumpsuit walking through test chambers with a number on his back. Unfortunatelly though, nobody could prove that thought and he couldn't really do anything to find out, whether this feeling was true or false.
As he slowly fell asleep, the elevator kept going, passing more floors of the facility of Aperture Science. Between that countless number of walls, there was a one, which if he knew what was behind, he wouldn't be sleeping as peacefully as he was.
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Fanfiction**Spoilers for Portal, Portal 2 and Portal 2 Co-Op!** GLaDOS was more than happy when Atlas and P-Body found so many new human test subjects for her. All she had to do from then on was to make sure that the history she's had with humans so far would...
