So, my first steps. I'd say they went well. I mean, I wanted them to go better. I'm glad I have the support of Chell, and even Caroline on it. And yes, I'm calling her Caroline because she asked me to. But I've been practicing walking and blinking and basically all of that human stuff again. It was a bit nostalgic for me, if I'm honest. I mean, I remember the appearance vaguely. I suddenly feel more.... Accomplished. Like I was supposed to do that. I dunno, might just be the body. Which, according to Chell, is good looking to human standards.

On a related note, I can't actually say my 'Ch' at all... It just comes out as 'K' or 'Th.' I found that out the hard way when I tried to talk to Chell while we were walking back.

I was sitting in the couch by the cores, who weren't as mean as before. I guess we could be friends. I mean I only had a problem with Rick, who wasn't really much of a jerk anymore.

"So.... She just gave Aperture to her bots?" Began Rick.

"Yup. I'm not really sure why she would be acting so nice all-"

"What is it?"

"The cores!"

"We were the cores." Rick said, a bit annoyed.

"No-no the other ones! Anger and Curiosity, and the uh, Cakemix!"

"What about them?"

"Don't you get it?! She lost the cores. They were blown up in her corruption! She's like a normal bloody human now!"

Rick looked at her for a moment. She was staring at her birds with Chell. They were kind of just watching what they were doing.

"She does seem a lot nicer... I guess you're right."

"That's what I'm telling you, mate!" I said, smiling.

"Sure.... 'Mate.' "

I laughed. "But she still has a pinch of her other personality. Otherwise, she wouldn't have brought any of you back. So that would mean she does have two personalities."

"So you mean the old body and the human body... But there's another." Rick said.

"She does?!" I said, leaning in a bit closer. Caroline and Chell looked up. "Well, go on. Tell me."

"There's a reason she's called Caroline, you know. She's been a human before. Otherwise she would've had to learn how to walk with a computer. I mean, we did." Rick looked over at the other cores for a moment, then quickly looked back.

"So..." I began, "Caroline was her human name?"

"Apparently so. Uh, I was actually with her when she was like that. Actually, us corrupted cores had just finished being built. They didn't find out that we were corrupted until Aperture Science Innovators was long gone."

"Until Aperture Science who?"

"Innovators." Said Caroline, leaning a bit closer to us. "Aperture Science Innovators. That's the gap you keep talking about." She sighed.

Chell came a bit closer, too.

"Mr. Johnson was the head. He was the beginning. He put me in charge when he died."

"Uhm, so Aperture Science Innovators was where you two landed after the fall?" I questioned.

"Do you want me to just tell you the whole story?" She asked, with a slight frustration in her tone.

"Here's what I know. Mr. Johnson bought a salt mine in- Wait, that's not the start. Mr. Johnson was an entrepreneur, he had started a shower curtain company."

"And what does that have to do with science?" Asked Rick.

"No interrupting. The company grew over the course of at least 8 or 9 years. He made so much money from it, he was impressed with himself. That's what he told me, anyway. And yes, I know, it seems impossible to make that much money off of shower curtains, but he did it. So, with the money he had, he took the credit of following his lifelong dream of becoming a scientist."

"Okay, now it's starting to make sense." Rick said, sounding a bit relieved.

"And with it, came the next 57,000 years of my life. And the next 57,000 years of your live's as well." She said, looking at the other (not so) cores.

"I'm 57,000 years old?!" I asked.

"Well, now your only 24 as a human. But yes, that's about how old you were as a core. I mean, Chell was in suspension for 50,000 years, you were in space for 9 months, and all before that was about 7,000 years of it. Do the math."

I saw Chell looking a bit confused. Probably because of the fact that she was in suspension for 50,000 years and hasn't known it. She grabbed her notepad and her pen to begin writing. She turned over the page and showed it to Caroline, I leaned over and looked at it.

'9 Months in space?' It read.

"Uhm, yeah. 9 months. Not too long. I'm not actually sure if that's a long time or not. Don't really have any standards, if I'm honest. Actually, I'm surprised my system didn't crash. That's pretty impressive for a core that was built to 'Regulate your behavior.' "

'Why didn't you tell me?'

"I thought you knew, honest. You've been outside of Aperture for 9 months, right?"

She shook her head.

"I think I see the confusion here." Caroline began. "You blacked out after I uhm, did you know what to you know who. You were like that for about 9 months. He was in space for about 9 months. Simple as that. You just don't remember any of it because you weren't even conscious."

"Well that makes sense, I suppose. How about finishing the story?" I asked.

"Right. Anyways, in Aperture, he needed a few things to get him started. First came the repulsion gel. In laymen's terms, it's the bouncy blue gel that you can jump on and it makes you jump really high. Like a trampoline."

"What did they use it for?" I questioned.

"Testing. That was the next thing. But they saw that it didn't have many different variances on it's own for testing. Really, the only thing they could do with it was make stairs that you jump on and jumps that get progressively harder. That didn't work out, so he made the 'Aperture Science Dual Handheld Portal Device.' Along with cube and button based tests."

"So he captured people just like you did?" I asked.

"Oh, he didn't. He actually let them go there voluntarily... In a limousine." She replied.

"But were there any other sort of tests that he tried, like an alternative or something?" Asked Rick.

"Uhm, yes, actually. Only one, though. Some idiots volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA. As I had predicted, it was a failure and he made a new series of tests. He let people kill the people who had been injected, the mantis men, because the men were actually trying to take over a bit."

"Well that's not much of a test at all, now is it?" I said.

"Not one bit. Anyways, the tests were another success. Much bigger than the shower curtains. It was around then that he had hired me to work as one of his scientists. Seeing my hard work and effort, he gave me a promotion as his assistant. And in time, his wife. Believe it or not, I was the one who had the original idea for propulsion gel. The orange, speedy gel. Which was made about a year later.

"So he was like your Wheatley." Said Rick.

"Don't you DARE compare Mr. Johnson to such an idiot!" Caroline exclaimed.

I looked at her for a moment and so did Chell. I'm seriously tired of being called that. She took a moment to calm down and catch her breath.

"And, as discussed the other day, we had a daughter named Chell and he was in his older days now. He knew that he was going to pass soon, so he helped his engineers work on a project of a supercomputer who can do just about anything that a human can and can't do. He called it the 'Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.' GLaDOS. While he was waiting for it, he was receiving more money than he knew what to do with. He decided to work on another gel."

"And that gel was what?" I asked.

"I'm getting to it. The idea was to create gel that was made out of liquid moon rocks, because that's what you place portals on. He wanted subjects to see it and think that something in the room has to have the gel there so they can place the portal. Without the gel, you can't place your portal there. He bought 70 million dollars worth of moon rocks and-"

"70 million dollars?!" Rick exclaimed.

"He was rich, what can I say? So he bought them, ground up. He mixed them into what was then known as 'Conversion Gel.' But he didn't know that ground up moon rocks were poisonous. He became very sick in the process, to the point of almost guaranteed death. So he knew that by the time his engineers finished GLaDOS, he would be gone."

"And then he passed a few months later, right?" Asked Rick.

She teared up a bit.

"Yes. He-he did. Good inference. But after realizing that, he asked me one of the most important questions of my life. He wanted me to become GLaDOS. He wanted me to have the immortality. I quickly declined, I just didn't want to leave him in his death. And I really didn't want to leave you, Chell. Mr. Johnson was a horrible father, just so you know. But he forced me to be GLaDOS. He forced me into the body. Not even a goodbye."

"And from then on you were GLaDOS." Said Craig, who had been shockingly quiet lately.

She sighed. "Yes. I was GLaDOS. And after he passed, Chell, you were taken to the adoption center I assume. And that's where Aperture found you and took you in for testing. You know the rest."

A few things still ran through my mind, like about how the place became abandoned, and more.

"One question." I began, "Why did you need us cores anyways?"

"To regulate my behavior." She said quickly.

"No, I mean like, why did you need us to regulate your behavior? What was wrong with your behavior to begin with?"

"Oh, right. When Mr. Johnson put me in the body, I was extremely upset and angry at them all for building it and for forcing me into that monstrous AI. So, out of anger, I turned on the neurotoxin and killed everyone in the room. They shut me off and turned me on again, I tried to turn the neurotoxin back on, but they shut me off before I could. Then they built Morality for me and turned me back on. It actually worked for about 10 seconds. Then I turned on the neurotoxin again. But after that, they tried all 3 of you guys, but they quickly realized that you were corrupted and threw you away."

"Oh." Said Rick, slightly sad.

"Don't worry, you weren't completely thrown away, we basically store all of our trash until we are sure that we don't need it. I don't do that, but that's what the scientists did. After awhile, they built Anger, Curiosity, and Cakemix. Actually, Cakemix started out as a joke, but quickly took me over before the scientists could stop me."

"There's more." Said Doug.

"No there isn't. That's all that happened before she woke up." Caroline said, frustrated once again.

"Wrong, there's a reason she actually woke up the second time. There's a reason she knew where to go when she escaped the incinerator room. Me. I put arrows that lead to your chamber. I made it possible for her to wake up again. I gave her the first portal gun she had held in 50,000 years. I even built Morality, that's why I still have it."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"That's about it."

"So now you know the entire story of Aperture."