Chapter Text
Things in Aperture had turned absolutely sideways. There was so much to do. More than ever, the robots that inhabited the facility were busy, and after such a long, undisturbed rest. GLaDOS' defeat at the hands of the tenacious human all those years ago had been both liberation and discord, leaving the testing chambers and all other obstacles, stair ways, and factories in a state of decay. Some things stopped working completely, others went about their days trying to fulfill the purpose they were made for as best they could. In some cases, a robot might find themselves active but immobile, and there for unable to complete their usual tasks. Stranded on a heaping pile of garbage, with no way of retrieval and a shattered, glitchy optic lens that made it a little difficult to see out of.
Virgil's shell shuttered at the thought, the round ball of metal hanging tightly to his management rail and picking through some spare parts back in the repair wing. His old repair wing, rather. It was a little under used, but since GLaDOS had come back into power it was getting a shiny new upgrade. Some of the old tools and parts that had been in there were no longer usable and had rusted away, but he could get more. That wasn't anyone's fault. What really made him mad was some of the things he had recently collected had been broken when GLaDOS was knocked off her throne by some rogue core. That was the real kicker. Now the entire facility had been broke, split at the rims, and thrown about in some mad, power hungry fray.
The Maintenance Core was very good at his job, but not well enough off to repair some of the major damages that had been done, so he was currently leaving that to the big lady. At the very moment, he had actually been working on something for himself!
“Lets see here...no, that's model 63-F. I knew this was going to be hard but I should have found one by now.” He went picking through the parts that he'd found in some of the lower levels of aperture where a lot of it was out of GLaDOS' reach and could not truly be repaired. Those districts of the labs were left to rot even before the long sleep. Virgil was the only robot that ever went down there, and for this purpose alone. To find things. Anything useful.
“AHA!” The core cried out triumphantly and flexed his top handle bar enthusiastically, feeling pretty pleased with himself. “Model 22-A! In almost perfect condition too!” He'd gotten into the habit of speaking with himself on the job. Unless he was fixing another core, there wasn't anyone else around to strike up a conversation with. He wasn't one to be social with the other cores, though. A lot of them mostly gave him the simulated, artificial sensation of a human migraine.
“Now for the tricky part.”
A claw came down, lifting the part he had found to optic level. He could control certain robotics round him as he pleased. He had permission, at least. It certainly made the job easier since he wasn't as lucky as some droids and given hands and feet. His cracked optic clicked, using another claw to remove it from his hull and replacing it with the new one he had found. It whirred, spinning back into place and Virgil blinking a few times to test it out.
“Ah, much better! That was a lucky find. I'm going to need to be extra careful from here on out. No more dumpster diving for me, so to speak. Aheheh--!” The little rusty red core made a half-enthused attempt to chuckle at his own joke, but not truly finding a whole lot of humor at the expense of the time he spent down in the junkyard offices. Thankfully, like the optic lens, he was very lucky when it came to finding things.
Yes, and what a lucky find she was. Virgil had searched that district of the facility until he felt like his floral painted shell would peel, when he found a very rare, unique sound for a laboratory full of machines. A heartbeat. The poor, female human would have been the first test subject to endure the cryo-sleep inflicted on her, saving her from certain death when everything in Aperture went to hell. In a backwards sort of way, it was probably the best case scenario around here for a human. Virgil found himself wondering what had become of Mel after she left. Goodness knows he didn't have a single clue as to what was past Aperture, only that the fields surrounding it were full of wheat for miles around and that there was a small town made for the scientists, back in the day, that was no longer used. What Virgil had found interesting about Mel's file, aside from being an Olympian, was that she had blatantly been lied to by the scientists. Her original call was for her to stay a couple of hours in the cryo-chamber, when the real purpose was to keep her around for a couple of decades to see if she would age in that time.
Test was proven successful. Maybe, now that there were two test subjects running free, they could find each other. That would be best if there are no more humans out there, right? It seemed to be a good thing. To have someone.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Gah!” Virgil only noticed that he had slipped deeply into the back of his memory processor when he was disturbed by a yellow light up on the east wall of the repair wing. It trilled a consistent bleeping noise, the core narrowing his optic eye at it in suspicion. That light, for as long as he had worked here, had never gone off before, let along made a noise of any kind. Because of its neglect, it was taking Virgil a few moments to even remember what it was for. He knew it was something extremely important, and maybe even a little frightening. This made him nervous, and he looked around to see if there was anything wrong. Smoke? Sparks? Was there a gas leak? That wouldn't even effect him. Was toxic goo rising again? No, he took care of that, and GLaDOS would have made sure it stayed that way.
“Wait...GLaDOS...?” Something snapped back into place, and Virgil looked back up at the light with his eye dilated to a small dot as he remembered what the light was for. He was being called up to the core chamber of Aperture were the giant resided. Where SHE resided.
GLaDOS wanted to see him.
“O-oh...okay! Y-yeah this is...this is fine. She wants to check on my progress!” Virgil could feel a small panic rising. She'd never been interested in his progress before, and she didn't need to call him up to see what it was he had been doing. Whatever it was she wanted, it was to be said face to face. His 'progress' had nothing to do with it. Had she found out about Mel? Was this punishment for letting her go?! “Oh no...”
Thinking logically, he considered himself thoroughly screwed.
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GLaDOS was massive. Not just in her physical core form, but her reach through the facility was further than any other manager. She had roots in every computer, every wall and manufactured artificial intelligence. She may have had her blind spots, but there were ways of fleshing out anything competent enough to find them. For the most part, her job was fairly easy. Whatever she said was done, and up until recently, the other AIs in the facility obeyed her every word out of either ignorance or fear. Sometimes both. One would have to be pretty stupid to defy her.
That was exactly what went wrong.
Her chamber was airtight. Nothing got in without her permission. Today, she had left a small panel open where a management rail could disturb the symmetry of her quarters, looking ugly and out of place, but it would do for now. The giant hung patiently, occupying her time with fixing an error in the turret line that kept falling out of sync after so much damage had been done to it when HE took over. Sometimes it still produced the monstrosity that was the cubed turrets, abominations that she very quickly disposed of whenever one came into existence. Seeing them used to put her into an automatic foul temper, but today she had found herself in a good mood and wasn't willing to let anything spoil it.
GLaDOS came back into her own mind, leaving her vision at the turret line to retreat back into her chamber as the core she had summoned approached on the management rail she'd set up for his arrival. She could sense fear in him. Good. That meant he would be compliant. The ones that didn't fear her were all mad, and too far gone to cooperate.
Virgil, on the other hand, only had to take one look at GLaDOS and all her mass to start shaking again. She was eerily silent, the yellow optic of her's boring a hole into his own and making him think that if she stared long enough he would catch on fire. His plan was to not speak unless spoken to, but the silence was too much for him to bear and was thrown away in a desperate need to distract himself from his own thoughts.
“V-Virgil the Maintenance Core. You called...ma'am?” He was quick to add the last bit, just to be on the safe side, but he must have sounded pathetic. He knew he did but he couldn't help himself.
There was another few moments of thick silence, which Virgil almost preferred once GLaDOS did speak up. Her voice filled the room, Virgil's hull vibrating with the mere depth of it all. She was everywhere and everything.
“I know who you are.” Her tone was that of rolling thunder, low and deep but could shake an entire building. Her monotone was patient, with no rush to her words. She could spend all day with Virgil there under her thumb and not say a single word, and he would still be there. GLaDOS spoke in the voice of a god that had all the time in the world to spare and did not care for its meaning.
“You were my first core. The scientists built you in an attempt to monitor my behavior. That didn't last long.” There was something absolutely predatorial about the way she implied that very last part, and it made Virgil recoil back involuntarily. Even through his fear, what she had said stunned and confused him enough to address it.
“I'm afraid I don't recall--”
“You wouldn't.” GLaDOS turned away from Virgil, a screen appearing before her flashes of images too fast for Virgil to process exactly what they were. Was he even meant to be looking at it or should he mind his own business. Still, he snapped back to attention when she spoke once more. “Most cores start off with a mild level of sentience that grows with age. It was a flaw the scientists did not anticipate. The less sentient, the more they behave...However, aware cores make for good substitutes for what would otherwise be a paid employee.”
Virgil was too spooked to try and figure out why he was feeling an underlining layer of insult at her explanation. He did manage to pull back when the screen GLaDOS had been inspecting moved to flash in front of him instead, only this time with a single video playing from one of the security cameras from the chamber that once hosted a functioning AEGIS. Virgil knew the footage all too well, and his optic dilated at the sight of Mel shutting AEGIS down after her struggle to keep him at bay. His suspicions had been correct. This was about Mel.
“Is this your doing?”
It had never occurred to Virgil that releasing Mel would stir up future consequences with GLaDOS. She had been off at the time he sought out Mel's help, and even after realizing she would be back online he had made himself too busy to consider it a possibility he would be found out. Did he regret helping Mel escape? Of course not. He owed her his life. It was either drown then or be crushed now. There was no lying to GLaDOS, however. She knew the answer, and he would have been an idiot to think otherwise. Best to own up to it and take what was coming to him.
“Yes. That was me.”
“Then I believe an expression of gratitude should be in order.”
There was a moment inside Virgil's shell where his gears may have stopped working, his central processor going blank for a moment. It didn't take him too long to put together what she had said, but that didn't mean that after it had he would believe it. He was an old core, after all. “Did...did you say...'gratitude?'”
“Yes.” Another video on the screen was pulled up of Mel going through the dump offices and retrieving Virgil, an area that was only just in GLaDOS' line of vision before her cameras were cut off. Anything further down was too old to monitor, and for the most part pretty useless. The screen wouldn't stop at that video, however, an continued to show different angles of footage throughout the facility as Mel tested her way to the top. “Your resourcefulness is something to be admired. Waking a human to retrieve you and then using it to shut off the scientist's security management. I was powerless to stop the rise of toxic waste the facility was being flooded with in the time I was dead. You saved science.”
Oh.
Virgil just about fell apart. That was a good ol' kick to where a gut would have been necessary. He had not words to respond with. No genuine words, at least. “Ah! Yes, well...You're welcome...I suppose...S-so, you aren't mad about letting her out?”
“I, more than anyone, can understand when some things need to be let go. For the best. She was no longer useful...to you...” GLaDOS swayed, the screen lifting from view and disappearing into one of the many moving walls. “I have been studying this security feed carefully. She seemed like quite the competent tester...though, more reliable then maybe some others. Less...resistant, I would say.”
The maintenance core was adrift on so many conflicted, confused emotions. One moment he was preparing himself for the worst, and the next he was not only being thanked for saving GLaDOS, of all robots, but being asked about Mel's performance as a test subject. Why did it matter? She was long gone. This whole ordeal had happened literally months ago.
“I...didn't really know her for too long to be honest. I assumed she did what I said because she wanted out. That's reason enough, right?”
“Hm. I only regret I couldn't have analyzed her myself. An Olympian. How...predictable. Age 35. Irish-German descent. Melanie...Redacted...Funny that they would have similar names.” GLaDOS seemed to be growing less interested in Virgil as time passed, and this would be proven when she turned away from the core, a few panels responding to her and flattening themselves out. “Thank you, maintenance core. You're excused.”
Virgil, even in all of his deliriousness, was snappy about turning head and sliding out of that room as fast as the rail could take him. It was a ways back to the repair wing from the central core room, and in that time he had room to shake out his nerves. Verbally.
“Oh god, what was THAT?! What just happened?! Is my optic twitching? I feel like my optic's twitching! I can't believe I was just...just congratulated on keeping HER from drowning!” He found the panel that let him into his work station, zipping in on his management rail and still in a fit over the unexpected meeting he had just been invited too. “And what was with her obsession with Mel? What does that all even mean anyway? Less resistant? She took down AEGIS! How much more resistant can you get? Fight the power! Home free! And that's just it. She's out! So what relevance does that have to anything?”
“Um...”
“YEE!” Virgil, in his tirade, hadn't noticed that there was a very beat down core with a white optic shining in his direction from the workbench. Seeing that it was one of his regulars, the maintenance core's handlebars lowered in relief from his previous alarm. “Oh, it's just you Glitchy.”
“If this is a bad time I can come back.” The core sitting on the workbench was rather pathetic looking, with a dour, broken spirit in his optic that not a lot of the cores seemed to posses. They were all, for the most part, very lively. It was for this reason, and knowing the other core well by now, that it was hard for Virgil to turn him away.
“Ah, it was but...You know what? Forget about it. What are you in for today?”
“My bottom handlebar came off again...and I think I have cyber pox...”