And then she's inside a room.

Or sort of a room. Well, it is a room, in that it's large and empty and has a metal door over there and metal walls around her in a rectangular shape. It's not a room in that it's really very large, large enough to contain a house or five, and the walls are metal because they're machinery. There are a few large laser-gun-like things pointed directly at the center of the room protruding from said walls, the ceiling, and the floor, with a suspended plate right in the middle, connected by a catwalk to a wall where a human would presumably appear or depart from. Said machinery seems to be winding down and dying of a last energy surge.

Another notable feature of this is that this machinery is apparently at least some sixty years old in design and at least two hundred in actual age.

A metal door, meant for humans or at least human-sized things, embedded on a wall at the end of the catwalk over there.

It... falls off its hinges, actually. Not in the best state of repair ever, that door. And beyond it: a badly lit hallway, meant for human-sized things.

• Open the doors using the probe. Gently.
  
• Investigate these arms: are there obvious controls for them?

The stairwell gets progressively darker until it is pitch black. And it goes down, down, down, a long way without stop.

The two doors at the very end of the hallway lead to a control room and a watching room identical to the first two she saw. The door across from where she came from leads to another huge chamber with machinery and laser-gun-things like the one she arrived in.

The displays are still pretty dead. It's not immediately obvious what any of the controls themselves are supposed to do, they're either regular keyboards or big buttons without labels or strange old levers.

The first and most obvious thing they connect to are the displays themselves and the laser-gun-things in the room where she arrived.

Yep, the computer is inside the walls around the huge room.

There is quite a lot of space inside the walls, but the wires all point up, and the outer walls of the place are all rock.

A... human-sized thing can go through, yes, if it manages to make its way around the tangle of thick cables that go up the cylindrical tunnel.

She'll be going up for a while.

It is totally a dead-silent abandoned underground cave! The ceiling is about a hundred feet above her. There are a few rectangular metal structures propped up on steel columns and held by steel cables, high up, but the ground she's standing on is earth and mud, puddles of water here and there. There are fallen metal structures, disconnected cables, a few open-air elevators in cylindrical tubes, and the space is large enough that there's fog between her and the walls.

The internals of one of them is shaped somewhat oddly, with a couple of boxes strewn about, spring traps, one door on either side without any obvious way to access each from the other, buttons as large as the boxes, and a glass tube stained blue.

It's pretty consistently and completely empty, and wastefully so, given that there are a few other similar rooms here and there which could have been ground level but are in fact hanging there. There are some other structures—proper buildings, really—attached to walls, probably leading farther into them. And all of them are, invariably, eaten by time.

A quick look through some of the buildings. Any computers, libraries, filing cabinets? Other sources of information?

She investigates the computers; do they have identifiable separate data storage devices? Do they look in condition to be successfully turned on?

Yes to both.

...the power switch doesn't work.

The obvious conclusion is that no power is being supplied to the computer and it has no internal energy storage. Does checking the voltage on the power cord validate her common sense in this nonsense place?

No power is being supplied to the computer, and if it has internal energy storage that storage has run out perhaps a hundred years ago.

The wires from the computer lead aaaaaall the way across the cave from where she is to another one of those squat buildings, specifically to a single mechanical lever.

The computer starts booting! That's a process that takes about five minutes.

A picture of a woman wearing a lab coat above a white rectangular box with a blinking vertical bar, with a circle made of triangles on the background.

The books there are all technical, for varying definitions of the word. From physics to engineering through philosophy, the few pictures present are diagrams, graphs, and formulae.

Lots of data! Lots of presumably text data! Structured in a way that might just suggest reports, or experimental data collection, perhaps. Or maybe that'd be reading too much into the white coat and experimental setup around.

Not as far as she can yet tell, no. At least, not in simple, clear text format.

"Testing facility 4#3@0."

"Be careful of @$63$70$ 90!$0#!#6."

"DANGER: DO NOT TOUCH"

"Know your 94#400%32!"

Along with a variety of drawings.

The elevator shaft leads her into the stone ceiling and very quickly into—

—the inside of one of the weird rectangular rooms, apparently. Its layout is different than the ones from below, but shares the basic fact that there's no obvious way for someone who can't fly to get to the other door there.

It's also much darker in there than it was downstairs (even though there hadn't actually been a whole lot in the way of a detectable light source there...), the only light coming from the hole she just came out of and a few glowing bits visible through windows into the room.

No movable arms, yes empty space, although it's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to see anything there.

Nope. Pretty sturdy and reinforced—someone really didn't want people to leave this room.

It reluctantly opens, leading the way to a metal walkway above a dark (if less than the room she just left) precipice above an extensive body of (presumably) water and another elevator.

The rooms are not rectangular there! They're spheres. Many spheres, connected to each other via these elevators, inside this huge, cavernous... cave. The bottom of the cave, from which her elevator shaft emerged, is stone and water (or potentially not water, the words DANGER and KEEP OUT keep repeating every now and then), and there are some other squat buildings there, connected to the whole rig.

She searches the buildings for information (or, perhaps, means of communication).

There are some rooms in the building that are somewhat similar to the ones she explored downstairs, but there are also some less obviously technologically advanced (for the time) buildings. There are instructions for "testing" on various posters on the walls, though her ability to read the language may not be sufficient to understand what it all means.

This computer is less technical! Probably belonged to someone who did some sort of secretarial job instead of a techie, so it has much more in the way of mundane language. It also has several files, probably outdated, containing various details about test subjects and test procedures.

Someone did not know how to do science.

It's not looking non-defunct yet, and apparently it's all only theory as far as she can tell (at least at the point in time where she is). Something about the main guy—Cave Johnson?—wanting to upload his brain because he's going to die soon, and his assistant Caroline, too.

Onward, onward—

—networked computers.

Tap in, any traffic? Is this a local network that's entirely shut down like the computers, or the aged fringes of an active network?

She reaches a somewhat smaller but still impressively huge cavern with an enormous metal hatch door on the ceiling—easily fifty feet wide. There are three pipes, large enough for a human to fit inside, labeled with blue, orange, and white stickers, with nothing going through them and winding around the cavern. The place's the least broken she's seen so far, but still pretty decayed.

Any less-enormous doors available? (She won't be surprised if there aren't.)

Nope, no less-enormous doors available.

She goes through the enormous door as soon as it's sufficiently open to quickly get all of her through, then shuts it again and heads out over the fence.

The ceiling seems to expand almost indefinitely in all directions, and it gets darker and darker as she advances away from the huge hatch door entrance (albeit never getting properly, truly dark). If she advances enough, she'll find the structure is inserted into the cave walls.

Was worth a try. How about that staircase?

It leads to a closed door... that has a crash bar, quite like an exit door should have. Except it is apparently not an exit but rather an entrance.

The wall panels inside the cylindrical room are all screens and detaching them will probably cause them to stop displaying the stuff they're displaying; the panels in the room before are possibly easier to detach. No service access, no discreet cargo elevator, but there seems to be mostly empty space up from where she's standing, as wide as the room itself.

She goes back to the plain wall panels and attempts to make an opening either by detaching or reshaping the panels. If the empty space can be accessed from “outside the room” this way, she'll take it.

There's space! It's not empty. It's filled with active machinery, a veritable web of mechanical arms and panels and jigsaw structures. They're all still, with specific shapes to the rooms built by the armed panels, and there are much better maintained metal catwalks between the machines.

Yep, same network, and the interface is slightly different but still wired.

She follows the network wiring; as necessary, tapping in and following the branch with more traffic. Whether this finds a control system or merely the most active area, hopefully it will be informative.

There's not a whole lot of it exposed, and it soon hides within either walls or mechanical arms.

Elevator shaft it is. She breaks into the shaft above the screen-walled area and heads up.

The voice continues: "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties due to circumstances of potentially apocalyptic significance beyond our control." The screen-walls around her start displaying schematic cartoonish information on what to do in case of apocalypse.

Oh, there's an “up”. She heads up. Perhaps this giant plant has found the sky.

Perhaps it has! It's certainly going up, and there's a lot of this machinery in the way, mechanical arms holding rooms and other devices together, metal catwalks between them leading to behind-the-scenes rooms. And it really has taken over the facility.

The plant's roots and vines thicken and grow as she approaches what's probably its origin point, in one of the non-temporary rooms. Signs of decay and destruction abound, nature well on its way to reclaiming the facility.

Huh. Well, she's not actually investigating this plant. She'll follow it upward, whether that's rootward or not.

Well, if she just follows its vines it will go up and she will definitely find its root, inside a room with a few signs and childish drawings and booths and chairs.

She ascends, ascends—

—sees movement.

Freeze, look, consider hiding (nah), observe. Is it machines or is it people?

Machines! Or, rather, a machine. A metal sphere with an aperture for a colored eyelike pattern emitting light and handles to either side of it seems to be zipping along a small monorail following the path of a catwalk from above.

It goes to the end of this section of the rail, which has been cut off from the rest of the rail by plants, then it turns around and starts returning the way it came, and then it notices the flying probe and stops. Its eye (?) widens. "You can fly," it says.

"Fly me! Fly me! Fly me!"

"To my post! I need to go back to my post. I couldn't, this is broken. Now I'm here."

"No map. But I know where to go!"

"Which way is it?"

It rotates around its axis to indicate the direction where the monorail's broken. "That way!"

Dented, twisted, and a section of it missing.

The sphere watches in fascination.

"Thank yooooou!" the sphere says, zooming along its newly repaired track.

The probe keeps pace with it.

It zips along, takes a left in a three-way intersection, then a right in a bifurcation, then goes down in another bifurcation, and then reaches another broken section of the rail. It sways nervously, turns around, and stops, looking at the probe. Its eye widens. "You can fly," it says.

"Fly me! Fly me! Fly me!"

It detaches from the rail. "I'm flyyyying!"

Flying past the broken track!

The sphere starts giving her directions. Its post is apparently somewhat deeper and lower than she's been going, but the physical characteristics of the places it drives her through are pretty much always the same: catwalks, rails, platforms, mechanical things, all in various states of disrepair.

Eventually they reach a spot in a wall the rail goes through that only something as small as the sphere itself could pass. "Umm."

“Umm?”

"You can't go through this. It's too small."

"Oh but what if there's another broken part?"

Zoom! Zoom zoom.

Eventually the sphere slows down and starts looking around as they approach another wall. "It's over there," it confides.

Nope, it is a wall, with another small hole for the sphere.

The sphere asks her to go slowly and quietly. Behind the wall there are a few glass tanks with a number of other, similar spheres, piles of them. Most of them are inactive, but not all, and some are saying things to nothing and nobody. The sphere doesn't say a word, trying not to be noticed.

It is creepy, isn't it? The spheres are mostly quiet, even the ones who do occasionally quip one thing or another. One of them seems to be fixated on the idea of going to space, though, and another is spewing a lot of facts, about 70% of which are in fact false.

The sphere she's helping continues leading her forward until it reaches a little control room, isolated from the other spheres. "Can you attach me there?" it asks, probably referring to the pointy metal stick that emerged from a pedestal with various buttons and glowy pieces when they arrived.

The undamaged track ends abruptly directly above the spot with the pointy metal stick, but a square section of the ceiling around it seems detachable. There are, however, no labels anywhere—just glowy buttons that presumably do things.

"Thank you!" the sphere says happily.

Then, the same voice from the prerecorded messages from earlier says: "Personality core detected. Deadly neurotoxin management protocols restored. Deadly neurotoxin production and maintenance resumed."

AAAAAA yank.

"Personality core forcibly removed. Deadly neurotoxin production halted."

"Why'd you do that?" the core complains.

“Because I don't want deadly neurotoxin production.”

"But it's my job! If I don't produce deadly neurotoxin who will?"

The sphere blinks. "But then... how will deadly neurotoxin be produced?"

“When it is needed,” (never) “it can be produced by those who need it.”

"But by then there won't be enough deadly neurotoxin! A facility with a healthy quantity of deadly neurotoxin is a happy facility!"

"...then what am I gonna do?"

"I—I could—" It stops talking.

It can have a minute to think. They are passing by the occasionally-broken rails and catwalks.

"I don't know," it says, finally.

(Deadly neurotoxin production. What an idea. She's almost as bothered by how they've probably built the controls for it as the fact that they're doing it at all.)

The sphere falls silent.

Everything in this part of the facility is apparently networked, but proper interfaces are limited to the control rooms. They're also not very human-friendly interfaces.

She picks a control room and starts taking it (electronically) apart. She doesn't want to use it as is, she wants to know how it does what it does and then use the network directly. What are its protocols? What does it control? What information does it have about the rest of the facility? Does it have a specific superordinate?

It gets routed up. Waaaay up. Aaaaaaaalllll the way up. So much up.

Up is nice. She goes up.

...it might take a while. She was really deep down.

Actually, it might be a good time to take a break, since nothing is currently on fire or producing deadly neurotoxin. Is there a nice big unoccupied not-likely-to-become-occupied space handy along this route?

Depends on how picky she is with her "nice" requirement. Several of the control rooms she passed were probably comfortable at some point in the past, before they became dirty and old and filled with plants and various debris. But she's gone up far enough that most of the rooms are the weird (but spacious) test chambers and the little observation rooms attached to them.

She looks for a test-chamber-sized space that is not actually a test chamber.

She can surely find one of those amidst the ruins eventually.

The place does not respond to her thoughts.

Her alarms do not notify her of anything strange going on in the facility. Well, stranger than what has already been going on, at any rate.

Up up up!

And eventually she finds an elevator without a ceiling that should probably take her topside, although the top of the shaft seems to be sealed off by metal.

Well, she's not just aiming to go up. Where is the network wiring going relative to this?

A lot of it seems to go through and around the elevator shaft. And it all seems to go to some spot above and a couple dozen feet behind it.

She goes up to the top of the elevator shaft and examines the obstruction. Is it a door? (It's definitely not an absurdly huge door and will take much less time to claim as needed.) Is it just some fallen wall panel or other debris? Is it a permanent decomissioning sort of plug?

It's a simple, thin metal double door. Not hard to claim at all.

This was probably, at some point, some sort of a rather large room, on the surface, but the destruction is more thorough than what would've been caused strictly by time. It looks rather like it's been blown up and then claimed by nature. There are torn, burnt metal catwalks, pieces of wall here and there, and what appears to be...

...the remains of a robotic structure of some kind.

It's connected to the whole network.

And surrounding this enormous open space there is an even larger square box made of a strange shimmering blue forcefield, held together by towering black frames that seem to be generating the field.

It does have identifiable data storage, as well as an internal battery that's keeping something running in there which was activated once she disconnected the power. The format, however, is probably "the memories of a mad AI"—definitely nothing like sensible formatting—and there seems to be something running that's accessing the same bit of data over and over and over again.

Yep, firehose of status reports. Coming from the network itself, there doesn't seem to be anything regarding her presence or existence—whatever status reports she has generated have already been sent and either recorded somewhere (perhaps central AI's databanks?) or discarded. There are some periodic reports about various specific parts of the facility, though, and some of the most often updating ones are the reports on the turret production line (turrets are not being produced) or the deadly neurotoxin storage containers (they are not empty but the neurotoxin in them is old and stale).

Well, it's time to — actually, first, she picks up some bits of debris and throws them at the forcefield (slow and fast) to see what happens.

They go right through.

She sends a probe up into the air above the facility, adjusting the camera for wide-angle views of what might be visible around.

Up up up—

—the forcefield thing disintegrates it.

Sure. It's a destroyed mess of panels and weird dome-shaped devices with three metal "arms" joining together in the middle.

And if the addressing scheme is like so, then one of these commands should cause some panel or other device in the room to activate. Assuming they're not all completely broken.

One of the devices twitches a bit and tries to open, but a shower of sparks announces its death.

This test chamber can be a test subject. She tries things, and attempts to generalize the results into the overall protocol for controlling elements of the facility.

They're somewhat fiddly, built to be manipulated by an AI and not a human mind, and they rely on a bunch of assumptions about the organization of said AI. They're efficient, though, and once she gets the gist of it she'll be able to generalize pretty easily.

Nnnn—yes.

How about an inventory of all currently plugged-in Personality Cores, and what their duties are?

No, that one isn't immediately generalizable, the Personality Cores are very different things than test chamber pieces to the system.

Hmph. Inventory of replacement test chamber panels and other such apparatus? Status of its manufacture?

The manufacture of pretty much anything has been indefinitely halted (Can't she see that deadly neurotoxin and turret production has stopped? Nothing else would start working before that resumed.)

Jammed! Template is corrupted! Memory of template is corrupted! Data to create new template is inaccessible and waiting for input!

Hmm. She requests the corrupted template data to add to her understanding, and figures out what a valid template could be. Can she make a template which is “nothing”? Template of a turret that can't actually shoot? Turret that has a lockout system of her own design?

She cannot make a template which is "nothing," but otherwise the parameters seem to be something like "has the theoretical ability to shoot bullets" and "has an AI inside it." She can also use a physical example of a thing as a template by placing it in a certain location downstairs.

She would like to prepare to deploy the deadly neurotoxin directly into the incinerator.

That's a great idea! Except the incinerator's not operational either.

Yes, as central coordinator she has full control over the facility and can override any cores.

Once turrets and deadly neurotoxin are back online, she will be able to maybe work on deadly lasers, or the Aperture Science High Energy Pellet launchers and catchers. Or plates, everyone loves plates. Maybe even panels.

Dead destroyed test chambers, mostly, nothing she didn't see on her way up.

—and if it does not fit?

It is thrown into an incinerator!

Would that be the same incinerator that is currently not working?

Yes, the very same!

The incinerator has cameras to watch turrets die with, right? Do they perhaps show a pile of defective turrets, or did the incinerator stop after the turret line did?

Right! But the incinerator stopped after the turret line did, yes.

There are a couple! Is she going to be physically in sight?

"Hello," both turrets say at the same time.

“Aperture Science is under new management.”

They don't react to this.

The turrets can't turn to exchange looks, so they're just silent for a few seconds then say, in unison: "I don't know."

“What is your purpose?”

"To protect my charge."

“What is your charge?”

"I don't know."

“Do you need to be told what your charge is?”

"No."

Hm, that was ambiguous, actually. But first let's check: electronically, does the turret production line have a step after this point for “set charge” or just a general final reprogramming step?

Actually the only steps after template validation are boxing them up (for "commercial distribution") and shipping. No sign of any reprogramming.

Any interesting facts on the boxes or related material?

Yep! There's an instructions manual—apparently you just set the turret up and activate it and it will shoot anything that passes in front of it and has a heartbeat. And you can only turn it off by pressing a switch behind it, which, good luck getting there given you've set it up to protect stuff. There's also a warning saying that it must not, once activated, be dropped to its side or turned upside down, and that Aperture Science will not be held responsible for mishandling-related problems with the device.

The facility does not seem to object to her definition of functional turrets! She will be able to have as many useless turrets as she likes there. And the plants, of course, have even less of an opinion about their demise than the facility did about the turrets.

The next-highest priority item on the revitalization project is starting up the production of test chamber elements (especially panels).

Other than the fact that turrets and the neurotoxin had been stopped, just the general wear and tear a few hundred years of inactivity will tend to accumulate.

There's got to be subsystems for maintenance and repair to handle detail work like that, right?

Yup. They're also kinda damaged.

Too damaged to fix themselves? Great. She leaves the happy turret line producing happy turrets and goes over to take a look.

Plants! Man, these plants sure are annoyingly persistent, aren't they?

They are! They can just get chopped up and yanked away. Yes, even the tree-sized ones. (Once things are up and running, she can look into putting all this now-dead plant matter somewhere suitable.)

It... seems to be a fusion reactor.

And is it in good operating condition? What's its maximum output power, and how much is currently being used?

It's in pretty good repairs, yeah. The maximum output is 1 TW. Right now there's only about ten percent of that in use, but that number's growing as she reactivates systems and gets everything back online.

The generator is located more-or-less at the heart of the facility, a bit closer to the surface than the bottom.

Well, at least she won't have to slip through narrow tunnels in rock for hours again.

She will indeed not. It's fairly easy to find, and she will reach it without further inconvenience.

She opens a maintenance door and — has to hold the door and all of her near it against being blown forward by the air rushing into the chamber. (So that’s what that hazard icon meant.)

She skims and samples the activity and checks for more antisocial things to interfere with.

Deadly neurotoxin, deadly turrets, deadly lasers, deadly high energy pellets, deadly pits (either bottomlessly deadly or filled with deadly acid), deadly smashy spike plates, deadly rocket launchers, deadly bomb throwers, deadly incinerator rooms... those are about all the antisocial things there are in this facility!

1. When possible, shut down production.
   
2. When possible, destroy the existing stock.
   
3. Relocate remaining stock to designated areas of concentrated deadliness (let's call them test chambers, if it helps).
   

If the turrets are told about being spared from being smashed they will express thankfulness. The facility does not otherwise react to her technically fulfilling its poorly thought-out requirements.

So, about those humans. How are they doing?

Humans? What hu—oh, the test subjects? All in suspension in the Relaxation Chambers.

There are 587 humans currently in the Relaxation Vaults, all in perfect health. They seem to be a mix of ex-employees and their immediate family.

They are periodically awoken to go through the Aperture Science Rehabilitation Procedure so their muscles and nervous systems don't rot, and supposedly occasionally the central coordinator sends them through test chambers, but apparently that has not actually ever been done, with exactly one exception.

Exceptions are interesting. What information is available about that exception?

Parents: information unavailable. It doesn't say that they're dead or missing—there certainly are orphans and adopted people and things like that in other files—just that the information isn't there for Teytis to access. She doesn't seem to have any other connections. As in, the file actually says she doesn't have other connections, not that the information's missing.

No one else is marked as 'DO NOT TEST' while still in the testing line, and the various other candidates have various other values in their variously arbitrary measurements and details.

Well, they're woken up periodically for Aperture Science Mandated Intellectual And Physical Rehabilitation to make sure they won't atrophy, but there's the virtual equivalent of a huge button with lots of arrows and clear instructions on how to press it to start testing which moves the Relaxation Vault into the starting chamber of the Aperture Science Testing Track and wakes the test subject.

Some of herself meets someone on the way down.

"Oh. Hello."

"Oh. I'm Wheatley, I take care of the humans. Who are you?"

Wheatley's eye widens. "Oh! Yes, ma'am. Everything going fine, here. Nothing wrong at all. I'm glad to see you're safe and whole and very much not dead."

He follows one of her to the vault. "Of course, of course, happy to hear it. The, um, the humans are fine."

The vaults are, in fact, shaped like motel rooms. By whatever mechanism, the humans are on the bed, looking quite... relaxed. Probably in suspension.

Whatever mechanism. Are there any suspicious, possibly antisocial, mechanisms around the vault? Particularly rude alarm clocks? Just checking.

Nope! Nothing antisocial.

"And they're so, so healthy. Really, you don't even need to check on them, I've been doing quite a good job, if I may say so myself. Splendid."

The test subject awakening process begins. The first step involves moving the vaults to the respective test tracks (there can be many tracks active at any one time, apparently) so the test subjects won't lose any time.

"Oh! Of course, of course. Yes, they'll be very good test subjects, yep, the very best."