Innocent《Chelley》

Chapter 1

Spacial speed.

Innocent, intoxicating, spacial speed,

hurled headlong on chariots of fire.

-Story Musgrave

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Something brought her back.

Aperture was not, by any means, easy to find. There was a lot of wading in wheat fields to get to where she was currently standing. An old shed should have been easy to find in a place where there was flat gold for miles around, but Aperture made it tough anyway.

It took days, but there she was: cleaned up, hair up, wearing something other than the orange jumpsuit that had been glued to her skin since she could remember. She was standing in front of the shed's door. She was hesitating. She fingered the rust about the sharp edges of the corrugated steel.

Chell was unarmed, and she had come back. "Nostalgia," that's how she justified it. Homesickness. Loneliness. For once in her life she wasn't worried about getting killed, but she came back anyway.

She pulled, and the Aperture Science door, though it was heavy, yielded to her, and swung wide open.

The elevator inside didn't smell like a laboratory, like clean machinery and chemicals, like recycled carbon dioxide and plastic.

Rather, it smelled exactly like the wheat fields.

This was not the way Aperture was supposed to smell. Something was wrong. Perhaps a leak in the (normally airtight) door, perhaps she was the one who smelled like the wheat fields because she had been walking in them for forever, maybe she lingered in front of the lift too long while it stood open, sparking, waiting.

She stepped into the lift with some caution. The wheat smell was one thing, the sparking elevator was another: if the lift failed, she could go crashing back into the bowels of Aperture and find a grave among the toxic waste and the voice of Cave Johnson. There was no other way back into the facility, though, and she wanted to be here.

So she stayed in the lift, pressed one of the two buttons (down) and let it carry her.

The ride was slow and halting. She saw nothing but old gears and the rust of the elevator shaft for a good twenty minutes while the elevator crawled into the facility.

Then she saw them.

The turrets were positioned just as they were when she had last saw them. For a second, Chell imagined that they were going to sing a "welcome back" this time, an invitation to continue testing, to enslave herself again, to live in Aperture Science forever. Perhaps a "we knew you'd come back" sort of thing, GLaDOS telling her, once again, that she was useless without Aperture pushing her around.

But the turrets' lights weren't on. They weren't clicking or repositioning themselves, or talking quietly. They weren't humming, let alone singing.

They were silent.

It dawned on Chell that she was looking at a graveyard. The turrets hadn't moved from their positions during their farewell song. They were no longer operating. Though they were all turned to the lift, they were still, and their optic lasers did not watch her.