A Brief History of Aperture (and Chell)
Mar. 1st, 2014 05:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
givesyouchellOr, Danya spent a couple hours trying to fit the Portalverse and reboot!Roboverse together and ended up writing two pages involving minor crossovers, headcanon, and dicking around a little bit with the timeline.
Aperture was founded by Cave Johnson in the early 1940s as a shower curtain manufacturer called Aperture Fixtures. In an attempt to make the shower curtains sound more hygienic, the company was renamed Aperture Science Innovators before finally being renamed Aperture Science. It's main lab and testing facility (the Aperture Science Enrichment Center) was built in an abandoned salt mine in Upper Michigan, with a side facility in Cleveland, Ohio.
Aperture eventually shifted from being a lowly shower curtain manufacturer and eventually became a company dedicated to real science and pushed out a number of inventions including repulsion gel, the Weighted Storage Cube, and the Aperture Science Portable Quantum Tunneling Device. In its heyday, its test subjects were only pulled from the cream of the crop including Olympians, astronauts, and war heroes. The choices in test subjects eventually tapered out after a number of astronauts went missing.
By the 1970s, Aperture was struggling both financially and with test subjects (which were, at this point, vagrants who were paid $60 if they survived). It eventually got so bad that Aperture was bankrupt and employee testing became mandatory. But there was science to be done, and it was discovered that ground up moon rocks could be used to create conversion gel, an efficient portal conductor so that the now much smaller version of the Quantum Tunneling Device, the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (also known as a portal gun), could be used.
As it turns out, moon rocks are highly poisonous and eventually had poisoned Cave Johnson, who had at this point gone from being sort of kooky to outright bonkers. One of his last ideas was to find a way to upload a human brain onto a disc to achieve virtual immortality. Having the forethought that he most likely wouldn't live to see its invention, he declared that he wanted his faithful assistant Caroline to be uploaded in his stead (an apparently kept this fact from her, which may not have been the best move). After his death in 1981, Caroline took control of the company until 1986, when she was forced to become part of the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System (more commonly known as GLaDOS).
For Aperture, not much happened after that until the late 1990s. For a pair of employees (a scientist and an accountant), the start of the new decade brought them an adopted daughter named Michelle. Chell, as her parents started calling her, had a happy childhood. She went to school, she played soccer, she did science experiments on the dining room table, normal kid stuff.
In 1996, the Disc Operating System of GLaDOS was mostly functional so work began on the Genetic Lifeform half. In 1997, OCP began courting the company to buy them out since Aperture had made it very clear that they were close to completing a functional AI.
1998 was supposed to be Aperture's year. They had started releasing a number of testing devices to the public, which all flopped spectacularly due to the fact that they were dangerous and had to be pulled off the shelves. Due to these mishaps, OCP pulled their offer. That May, as part of Aperture Science's first annual Bring Your Daughter to Work Day (which, as the daughter of two Aperture employees, Chell was attending and showing off her potato battery), the previously untested AI for GLaDOS was brought online.
It, as can probably be guessed, did not go well. GLaDOS immediately took control of the Enrichment Center, put it into lockdown mode, and began flooding it with deadly neurotoxin. Before everyone in the facility could be killed, someone managed to attach a morality core to the power mad AI and she began a permanent testing cycle using the trapped employees as test subjects.
As one of the children trapped in the facility (and one of the youngest at that), Chell spent the next few years being somewhat taken care of by the handful of Aperture employees that were left. On her eighteenth birthday, she was added to GLaDOS's testing queue as test subject number 1498 (along with a note that, due to her being “abnormally stubborn” she not be tested). Over the course of the next four years, she attempted multiple escape attempts, which led her to being put into stasis (from which she would be woken up for a brief period every 50 days to prevent any brain damage) after having a pair of Aperture Science Advanced Knee Replacements attached for whenever her turn came. While she slept, Dr. Douglas Rattmann, one of the last few remaining Aperture employees who had managed to escape being put in the testing queue, put her at the top of the testing list in the hope that her sheer tenacity would lead to her eventually taking GLaDOS out.
Which led into the events of Portal: Chell was put through her paces as a test subject. She was shot at by sentry turrets, she jumped in and out of portals, she was forced to incinerate her Companion Cube, and eventually almost got incinerated herself. Which led to her confronting GLaDOS in her control chamber and Chell finishing off the AI and to get free. Sadly, her freedom didn't last long as she ended up being knocked out and dragged back into Aperture (which broke the springs on one Advanced Knee Replacement, leading to their removal and replacement with the long fall boots) by a Party Escort Bot, which put her back into stasis.
Only this time, something in the system failed so that nothing woke her from stasis every 50 days, leading to severe memory loss. Finally, after 16 years (this is the point where Portal 2 begins), she was finally awoken in 2028 when a personality core named Wheatley came to wake her up so she could help him escape. With the less than brilliant personality core, who had none-the-less managed to endear himself to her and be the closest thing to a friend that she had found in the Enrichment Center (with the exception of the Companion Cube), she braved the facility which had become overrun by nature. After a slight misstep where Wheatley accidentally reawakened GLaDOS, Chell got tossed into a new testing track as revenge for effectively killing the AI. In one of his few moments of brilliance, Wheatley helped her escape the test and the two set off to sabotage GLaDOS so they could finally get free.
The final step to freedom was to transfer power over the facility to Wheatley so that he could control the elevator to the surface. And that's where everything went horribly wrong. The power quickly went to Wheatley's head and, instead of sending Chell to the surface as planned, he instead decided to gloat and plug GLaDOS into a potato. After GLaDOS pointed out that the entire reason behind Wheatley's being was to be a moron and that Chell had done all of the work, he smashed the elevator into the ground, sending the two into the bowels of the Enrichment Center.
After working their way through parts of the facility that hadn't been touched in decades (and discovering through a series of recordings that GLaDOS had once been Caroline), they reemerged in the modern part to find complete and utter chaos and a potential reactor meltdown due to Wheatley's sheer incompetence. After a number of tests that Wheatley designed, they managed to return to the control chamber. In a resolution that involves redirecting bombs with portals, corrupted personality cores (including one that apparently has a black belt in bedroom), and a quick trip to the moon, Wheatley was removed from power (and left in space with a couple other cores).
Chell, who had been knocked unconscious due to lack of oxygen from almost being sucked out into space, woke up surrounded by GLaDOS and two bots to discover that GLaDOS has rooted out the last bits of Caroline in her system and apparently deleted her. Chell was finally granted freedom and sent to the surface (and was serenaded by a chorus of turrets, just to add to how surreal her day had been), where she was reunited with her not-incinerated, but still slightly scorched Companion Cube in an empty field. She walked south (not that she knew that, she just followed the first road she found) and eventually made her way to Detroit.
Aperture was founded by Cave Johnson in the early 1940s as a shower curtain manufacturer called Aperture Fixtures. In an attempt to make the shower curtains sound more hygienic, the company was renamed Aperture Science Innovators before finally being renamed Aperture Science. It's main lab and testing facility (the Aperture Science Enrichment Center) was built in an abandoned salt mine in Upper Michigan, with a side facility in Cleveland, Ohio.
Aperture eventually shifted from being a lowly shower curtain manufacturer and eventually became a company dedicated to real science and pushed out a number of inventions including repulsion gel, the Weighted Storage Cube, and the Aperture Science Portable Quantum Tunneling Device. In its heyday, its test subjects were only pulled from the cream of the crop including Olympians, astronauts, and war heroes. The choices in test subjects eventually tapered out after a number of astronauts went missing.
By the 1970s, Aperture was struggling both financially and with test subjects (which were, at this point, vagrants who were paid $60 if they survived). It eventually got so bad that Aperture was bankrupt and employee testing became mandatory. But there was science to be done, and it was discovered that ground up moon rocks could be used to create conversion gel, an efficient portal conductor so that the now much smaller version of the Quantum Tunneling Device, the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (also known as a portal gun), could be used.
As it turns out, moon rocks are highly poisonous and eventually had poisoned Cave Johnson, who had at this point gone from being sort of kooky to outright bonkers. One of his last ideas was to find a way to upload a human brain onto a disc to achieve virtual immortality. Having the forethought that he most likely wouldn't live to see its invention, he declared that he wanted his faithful assistant Caroline to be uploaded in his stead (an apparently kept this fact from her, which may not have been the best move). After his death in 1981, Caroline took control of the company until 1986, when she was forced to become part of the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System (more commonly known as GLaDOS).
For Aperture, not much happened after that until the late 1990s. For a pair of employees (a scientist and an accountant), the start of the new decade brought them an adopted daughter named Michelle. Chell, as her parents started calling her, had a happy childhood. She went to school, she played soccer, she did science experiments on the dining room table, normal kid stuff.
In 1996, the Disc Operating System of GLaDOS was mostly functional so work began on the Genetic Lifeform half. In 1997, OCP began courting the company to buy them out since Aperture had made it very clear that they were close to completing a functional AI.
1998 was supposed to be Aperture's year. They had started releasing a number of testing devices to the public, which all flopped spectacularly due to the fact that they were dangerous and had to be pulled off the shelves. Due to these mishaps, OCP pulled their offer. That May, as part of Aperture Science's first annual Bring Your Daughter to Work Day (which, as the daughter of two Aperture employees, Chell was attending and showing off her potato battery), the previously untested AI for GLaDOS was brought online.
It, as can probably be guessed, did not go well. GLaDOS immediately took control of the Enrichment Center, put it into lockdown mode, and began flooding it with deadly neurotoxin. Before everyone in the facility could be killed, someone managed to attach a morality core to the power mad AI and she began a permanent testing cycle using the trapped employees as test subjects.
As one of the children trapped in the facility (and one of the youngest at that), Chell spent the next few years being somewhat taken care of by the handful of Aperture employees that were left. On her eighteenth birthday, she was added to GLaDOS's testing queue as test subject number 1498 (along with a note that, due to her being “abnormally stubborn” she not be tested). Over the course of the next four years, she attempted multiple escape attempts, which led her to being put into stasis (from which she would be woken up for a brief period every 50 days to prevent any brain damage) after having a pair of Aperture Science Advanced Knee Replacements attached for whenever her turn came. While she slept, Dr. Douglas Rattmann, one of the last few remaining Aperture employees who had managed to escape being put in the testing queue, put her at the top of the testing list in the hope that her sheer tenacity would lead to her eventually taking GLaDOS out.
Which led into the events of Portal: Chell was put through her paces as a test subject. She was shot at by sentry turrets, she jumped in and out of portals, she was forced to incinerate her Companion Cube, and eventually almost got incinerated herself. Which led to her confronting GLaDOS in her control chamber and Chell finishing off the AI and to get free. Sadly, her freedom didn't last long as she ended up being knocked out and dragged back into Aperture (which broke the springs on one Advanced Knee Replacement, leading to their removal and replacement with the long fall boots) by a Party Escort Bot, which put her back into stasis.
Only this time, something in the system failed so that nothing woke her from stasis every 50 days, leading to severe memory loss. Finally, after 16 years (this is the point where Portal 2 begins), she was finally awoken in 2028 when a personality core named Wheatley came to wake her up so she could help him escape. With the less than brilliant personality core, who had none-the-less managed to endear himself to her and be the closest thing to a friend that she had found in the Enrichment Center (with the exception of the Companion Cube), she braved the facility which had become overrun by nature. After a slight misstep where Wheatley accidentally reawakened GLaDOS, Chell got tossed into a new testing track as revenge for effectively killing the AI. In one of his few moments of brilliance, Wheatley helped her escape the test and the two set off to sabotage GLaDOS so they could finally get free.
The final step to freedom was to transfer power over the facility to Wheatley so that he could control the elevator to the surface. And that's where everything went horribly wrong. The power quickly went to Wheatley's head and, instead of sending Chell to the surface as planned, he instead decided to gloat and plug GLaDOS into a potato. After GLaDOS pointed out that the entire reason behind Wheatley's being was to be a moron and that Chell had done all of the work, he smashed the elevator into the ground, sending the two into the bowels of the Enrichment Center.
After working their way through parts of the facility that hadn't been touched in decades (and discovering through a series of recordings that GLaDOS had once been Caroline), they reemerged in the modern part to find complete and utter chaos and a potential reactor meltdown due to Wheatley's sheer incompetence. After a number of tests that Wheatley designed, they managed to return to the control chamber. In a resolution that involves redirecting bombs with portals, corrupted personality cores (including one that apparently has a black belt in bedroom), and a quick trip to the moon, Wheatley was removed from power (and left in space with a couple other cores).
Chell, who had been knocked unconscious due to lack of oxygen from almost being sucked out into space, woke up surrounded by GLaDOS and two bots to discover that GLaDOS has rooted out the last bits of Caroline in her system and apparently deleted her. Chell was finally granted freedom and sent to the surface (and was serenaded by a chorus of turrets, just to add to how surreal her day had been), where she was reunited with her not-incinerated, but still slightly scorched Companion Cube in an empty field. She walked south (not that she knew that, she just followed the first road she found) and eventually made her way to Detroit.
