Test Subject #00001 - Prologue. Prologue

PROLOGUE

The chassis hung suspended in the vast, spacious chamber. The facility was fully repaired, much to the supercomputer's relief. A lot of work had been done to repair everything that had gone wrong. For example, the labouring task of manually removing 1500 pneumatic diversity vents from broken test chambers and malfunctioning turbines was enough to drive the supercomputer to the point of crushing itself with deadly spike plates, just to relieve itself of the irritating job.

Of course, it had been his fault to start with.

But now it was time to resume testing. The cooperative testing initiative robots had performed a good job of locating the 10,000 test subjects stored deep in the heart of Aperture, although that was a rather generous comment for the robots actually dancing half the way to a vault the supercomputer already knew the location of. But you had to give them credit.

The supercomputer turned its attention to a large screen implanted on the panelled wall. It presented one of the many rooms in the test subject relaxation center, with a test subject curled up in bed. In a microsecond, the supercomputer had scanned her personal file and opened her blank testing record. Of course, waiting for the core assigned to waking up the test subjects in the relaxation center wasn't an option anymore. A manual testing start-up function would have to happen. Something the supercomputer hadn't performed in a long time.

And now, it was time to begin the test.