Wheat Field

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What makes you think I'm enjoying being led to the flood?

We've got another thing coming undone

And it's taking us over

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The wheat brushed against her legs -- soft, soothing tendrils snaking past dry, scarred, and heavily bruised knees. She stopped walking. She stood amidst the vastness of the oscillating wheat field that seemed to outstretch hundreds of miles everywhere she turned. The wind picked up, and her pony-tailed, chestnut hair split into a vortex behind her neck. Slowly, she knelt down, her fingers feeling for the buckles on her boots' straps. It was night; too dark to see beneath the wheat. She tugged them loose, and for the first time in a long time, her feet touched soil -- first her right, then her left.

Her eyelids dropped in bliss, as a weak, but genuine smile formed. A second passed -- and the rest of her body fell suit. She tumbled onto the ground, the cube-sized weight on her back dropping beside her with a soft thunk.

On her hands and knees, she peered up. She met the trillion scattered eyes of the stars, twinkling amongst each other in the night sky. They were... gorgeous.

Please. At least let this be real.

The Moon, the bright, huge, and perfectly round beacon, watched over them. She recognized its man-like face, the circular crater-eyes and crater-mouth agape, stuck in some perpetual state of alarm.

"GRABMEGRABMEGRAB ME--"

She cringed with a weak groan, and gritted her teeth. Her head dropped onto the dirt. Her hands balled into fists.

His voice rang inside her skull, a loud cacophony of fresh, traumatic memories. His shattered, twitching blue optic now pleaded at her. His optic, mere seconds before menacingly glaring at her, shouting for her demise, was fixated on her, a pinprick of blue light shivering in fear and longing, until Her mechanical hand smacked His casing and he was blasted into infinite space. Like a swift dunk into ice-cold water, she felt the rush of rage, of agony, of betrayal. Her stomach sank into a pit of dread.

And as if someone finally pulled the cork off, Chell weeped.

The woman curled up in a ball next to the soft, pink glow of her charred Companion Cube — she didn't know why she'd brought it along, but it seemed to find its purpose now — and wailed. It was ugly but cathartic, loud and unrelenting. Her resolve and terror shut her up in Aperture, as if the artificial environment rendered her as soulless as the rest of its inhabitants. Chell was outside. Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

She let herself cry; she'd earned it — And damn did it felt good. With nothing else to feel but sorrow, excruciating hunger, and pain, she sobbed, her tears softening the dirt.

Meanwhile, the wind blew past her trembling figure — a constant, faint whistle against the erratic sobbing and coughing. The wheat aimlessly danced around her. The sorry fact was, the earth didn't wait for her while she tested and withered away in an underground science facility. Life went on, and continued without her. Still, she felt something resembling solace, as she reminisced about the tenacity of the stars; the same ones she may have seen as a child, whoever she was.

But with no clue how far into the future she'd spent in a cryogenic coma... Finding herself to be truly alone, after all this time, would be devastating.

Whoever the woman she was before waking up, if she had somehow deserved her abuse, she had no memories of her. Perhaps, she was a despised criminal, a homeless woman picked off the streets, an orphan, or she was an Aperture employee who won the company-wide lotto for worst luck. It'd been difficult to come up with an answer to "Why me?", but Chell was content with never finding out.

Her last grasp at hope was a formidable, blue optic -- too-human-like to not rely on and get attached. Homicidal AI that seemingly redeemed herself? Out of the question. She was now convinced to never trust anything that had the ability to fucking betray in its programming so blindly, and that included humans. Moving forward -- if her body was able to carry her through the rest of the wheat field -- she'd only trust herself.

Chell cried the last of her tears, and quieted down, wiping her nose on her shirt. She exhaled shakily, as the heaviness and aching in her body subtly began to subside.

Once more, she closed her eyes, and stretched out until she found a comfortable position. She enjoyed feeling the soil around her conform to her curves, blanketing her back, even if the disturbed stalks of wheat dragged against her scars. It was better than a cold, cement floor, surrounded by the constant, maddening hum of sentient electronics.

She exhaled softly through her nose. The sounds of nature serenaded her, and pulled her fatigued consciousness deep into a tranquil slumber.

All at once, horrendous roaring of gears and animatronic machinery startled her awake. She froze, and watched in horror, as the beautiful, night sky ripped apart into rectangular panels. The moon was sliced into six panels, and as they pulled away from each other to retreat into the darkness, their monitors were reduced to static.

New white panels appeared and rearranged around her into a tight, claustrophobic box. A 6-by-6 panel box encased her, as an egg-shaped, red-eyed camera jutted out between two of them. It menacingly peered down at her trembling, sorry form.

"Did you honestly think I would let you go that easily? To run off into the wild like a lost baby deer?" Her soulless, artificial voice bellowed into the chamber.

The panels under her began to twist downward in random diagonal directions, displacing dirt and wheat as it slipped through the cracks and into whatever chasm lay below her.

Chell screamed in agony. She flailed her arms around for purchase on the other panels. The wheat stalks were easily pulled out along with their roots, leaving nothing but quickly dissipating soil and wheat strands in her fists. The panels beneath her sank more and more, and she desperately grasped the edge of the panel that now stood vertically with an exasperated groan. The companion cube dropped into the abyss. Then time froze, as she held onto the gradually dipping panel with vigor -- newfound strength gained by one last bout of determination and terror. Suddenly, Chell's panel jerked in a swinging motion, and she lost her grip from the soil-ridden panel.

In an instant, she was falling into a dark chasm. She sobbed, flailing about desperately in the air, as she looked down, and saw she was rapidly approaching a contaminated cesspool.

She jolted up, having awoke with a start.

Alone on a mattress.

In a dim-lit, white-walled room.