Part Fifty-Four. The Core

                                    

                                          
Part Fifty-Four.  The Core
                          
 
                          

                          
They were finally back home.
                          
Not that it felt like home.  It never had, and she didn’t think it ever would.  Home was a stable thing, something you wanted to come back to.  She hadn’t exactly wanted to stay in the war zone, but it wasn’t a relief to leave, either, as it probably should have been.
                          
After a few hours, Gordon tracked her down and told her Alyx had received something while she was gone that she’d probably like to see.  That was… odd.  Why would Alyx want to give something to Chell?  They didn’t have the best rapport.  They usually went out of their way to avoid each other, because no matter how much time passed Alyx never seemed to accept that Gordon was never going to be with her.  Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long.  Chell had a lot of things to do, particularly cleanup and resupplying after that mission, and she wasn’t really in the mood to deal with Alyx just then.
                          
When Chell got to Alyx’s workshop, she wasn’t there.  She grimaced.  If she had to wait for Alyx to show up, she was only going to become more resentful.  Maybe the thing she was looking for was just some piece of equipment Gordon needed her to pick up.  She moved farther into the room, hoping that was the case, and after she’d done so she saw just what Gordon had sent her there for.
                          
She had finally come.
                          
For the moment, she was paralysed with memory.  She rarely thought about the facility; she got over it a long time ago.  But when she did, it usually happened the same way: their voices began to echo inside her head and the atmosphere she remembered so clearly set into the room.  It never lasted long.  It wasn’t something she allowed to affect her.  She gave the memory a few moments to pass, then looked back up at the core on the table.
                          
Chell had half expected GLaDOS to find her eventually.  She had never been able to decide exactly why, or when, but she had known from the day she’d first started walking through that wheat field that it was not the last she would see of Aperture.  She wasn’t sure how she knew.  It wasn’t anything she could really explain.  It was a sort of cold, creeping feeling she got sometimes on days she couldn’t predict.  But she hadn’t actually realised just how easily it could be done.
                          
What was this core for, then?  From the looks of it, it wasn’t very mobile; it was attached to a cobbled-together management rail and appeared to be very absorbed in some task in front of it.  It was faintly reminiscent of the first cores she’d removed from GLaDOS’s chassis, white ceramic as opposed to Wheatley’s gunmetal hull, but it was considerably more streamlined and more or less pristine, other than minor scratches and one single crack running along the left side.  It must have occurred here, somehow; GLaDOS would never send damaged equipment out of the facility.  And was it a core?  Or did it just look like one?  Whatever it was, it was whispering something to itself in a very quiet voice, so Chell stepped a little closer to listen:
                          
“The little girl showed the ball how the new thing she had made worked, and it both made them very happy.  It was far more valuable than all of the dolls and the blocks and the balls all put together, and though the little girl often wondered if she had been ready to build it, never once did… did she… regret doing so.”  
                          
It was a core, but… why did it sound so sad?  “Hello?” she called out cautiously.  The core actually jumped and spun around to face her, and when it focused its restricted aperture on her face she was hit with a sudden rush of mental images.  
                          
She clearly remembered exactly this frightened expression on Wheatley.
                          
“Oh,” the core said.  It sounded feminine, and come to think of it the chassis was reminiscent of GLaDOS’s own.  “Hi.”