Wheatley - The Scientist

He needs to go back, he just has to. So he does.

Time runs backwards up there – it brings along the visions and the images, sliding on a constantly opposite orbit. There is just them, and memories, in the long nothingness of space.

The other side of the moon throws shadows on their surfaces. In the dark, he searches the past harder; but the circle he marches on stays the same, and one he can never ignore.

He is always silent – there is not much to talk about these days. He should have talked in other times, when Aperture was quiet and belonged to someone else. But everything ended in a couple of heartbeats – the really important words flew away in the emptiness of the universe, from the edge of his voice, while a desperate wind echoed his lies. He would have fixed it all, by all means, in no time.

It didn't work; no one would believe him. And while the two of them – the most unbelievable and perfect of matches – made his metal skeleton crack, he shook in the flow of energy as it tore his strength away, until he found himself with nothing at all to take care of.

He asked for this. All he can do, since then, is shut up.

Sounds die in space. He finds no words – he just waits for everything to return, ever the same, caught in his eternal static movement. Although the beginning returns very often, the Earth looks different each time; and he, with a growing weakness in his glare, watches the desolate lands of mankind from that unchanged position.

It is not much of a distance from where he came from. But, oh, that never-ending circle is such a long road anyway.

What he has left behind is far away. The eternal twin compasses close his circle on itself, and he, resigned prisoner, struggles to keep the pace of what his memory is losing time after time.

He rewrites his story in ever different words; the fragments of his thoughts, as small as grains of sand, get lost one by one in the starry skies. Still – no matter how many handfuls of eternity pass – the growing blur of his knowledge keeps steady points in his memory. His eyes never lose them; it is not that difficult in the end.

First of all, there was him. A core,or rather, the core that almost made it out of the laboratories with a living human. There was him – he is not anymore.

There are paths, the paths to the secrets of Science; all along the facility, they lie carved in concrete and panels.

And in the end – the brightest point on the map – there is her.

The only one who will ever know everything of Aperture. The one who, through the keys to survival, opened the darkest secrets of that place. She won for a reason – she never wished for anything but what was already hers. And, most importantly, she never let it go.

He remembers this. However, since chaos itself entered his chamber, he has been learning nothing about what happens down there.

She might be dead. Was she worth it all?

He wishes he had had more time, more room, more silence. He wishes he had been able to read the many signs in the air – so many ideas and feelings in her mind, behind her muteness.

She was a human after all. Only humans can fill the atmosphere with such wonderful incantations. The delicate shades of the soul – they must be so similar to the galaxies far away, to those shades of light he constantly watches from there. So various, yet so distant. Robots will never really know.

He is a robot, she is a woman. There was no way they would find the same language in each other's mind; and this is a fact, even though they will never know why science wanted them to be so equal and so different at the same time.

What really counts is that they found each other once – and both of them, in some way, are now reaching for their own separate ways. They follow a broken  compass, wading through a world that seems to have forgotten the last hint of order in its inner structure.

That, in fact, is what actually makes them similar; equally saddened companions, parted by a single difference.

Her path forgets and walks on. His own stops here, and struggles to go back to the start.

And if scientific studies tell the truth – if the flow of calcium and potassium and electric impulses can really create a wave of tears, a burning blush, a whole society – he knows what he  would really like to do now.

He would hold her hand firmly, telling her that the old days are not gone, that they are still friends. Make her understand that he has never really lost her. Well, if only he had hands – if only those things were true.

The world of humans is too difficult, too inaccessible. That is the fate of the same artificial beings created by them. Lies and truth have different values in each person's eyes – and these, he thinks, are the finest laws of injustice.

There is no real turning back, not even in the world of physics; for gravity is a flighty dancer, and vectors always point where they want to.

He sighs once more, resigned, and marches on. The chains of Science are such a burden.