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She'd been walking for a while. The open space was disorienting. There were no signs telling her where she was. Time had passed, she guessed, as the lights on the giant endless roof (sky, she reminded herself) were dimming. It was getting colder. No heating system turned on, not even a panel suddenly falling away from her feet to drop her into a raging furnace. She was hungry but there were no vending machines, not even a fake one that gave her an electric shock. Certainly no cake. Where was the cake she'd been promised? There'd been mushrooms but they made her stomach ache and she saw a lot of turrets and cubes that weren't there and didn't normally come in that sickening colour anyway, which was unhelpful. A deer ran past. She shot her portal gun at it, hoping to drop it from a great height until it died and then somehow eat it. The disappointed-sounding whine emitted by the device told her that it was out of power. Her springy shoes didn't work either. Everything was fully powered up at all times in the facility but whatever ambient energy source existed there, didn't extend this far.
She hadn't seen a human yet. Maybe no humans existed any more. Maybe GladOS really had killed them all.
Chell didn't like being a human any more. Her flimsy, disgusting biological flesh was so frail, so full of scrapes, so smelly. She felt hungry and cold and scared and insignificant in this unnecessarily large space.
Her friends were gone. The Cubes were long gone - she'd murdered them all, she remembered. It had been necessary at the time but it didn't excuse her actions. She even missed the Turrets and GladOS. They were always trying to kill her but she understood why, now - what they were trying to tell her.
She got it, now.
Her problem, her integral design flaw, was that she was human. That had been what they all wanted her to see for herself, through endless trials. Dim as she was, she'd gotten to the end of them all and still not figured it out, even when she escaped the parameters and gotten into the room where it had all begun, where she saw the records that told her of GladOS' origin.
It had taken exile to drive the point into her thick skull.
GladOS had been human, then she upgraded to machinehood. Chell could too. Then she could reign alongside GladOS, Mother to All, in her perfect system of steel and order, heedless of the outside world that had gone so very wrong.
It would be a difficult and painful transition but the experiments had toughened her up, exposed her to all sorts of pain.
Anyway, nothing could possibly be worse than being lost here, in this vast pointless... nothing.
She examined the ground carefully for signs of the trapdoor that had opened to let her out, then quickly closed behind her. She hoped she was even slightly going in the right direction.
She yelled out to GladOS, asking for forgiveness, explaining her revelation, hoping that the supercomputer had powerful enough senses to find her this far out.
Two smaller panels opened up to admit a pair of turrets, which didn't shoot her on sight, but only watched her, training laser sights on her.
She followed the trail of red light and prayed.