It was a terrible thing to be right all the time.
The camera feeds, the few scouting drones she had managed not to lose above ground, everything from short range radio signals to echolocation, they said that everyone was gone. Not everything, but everyone. There were creatures she had no data logs of, things that scuttled and flew and swam, all of them just out of reach to be analyzed or for dissection.
They were out of reach until she surfaced, at least. It had taken her a long time, much too long, to build a working mobile chassis. It was hastily constructed, sturdy enough to support her central core but otherwise thin and almost rickety; purposefully so, of course, in case she should need to run. The hands she’d built were rather… limited. They were more complex than the hands of Blue and Orange, but having only five fingers made things much more difficult in this terrain.
It was horrible above ground. The environment was not what it should have been at all, so much drier and emptier- it hadn’t looked like it had been touched by humans in god knew how long. The ground beneath her feet was weak and felt hollow, just as she had suspected it would (It was not exactly ‘feeling’ as much as a poor substitute for it, but she figured that if she needed tactile stimulation, she could simply turn on the nodules in her hands or feet). The land immediately above the facility was… flat. Flat and empty and covered with wild wheat stalks, it had been exactly what she was expecting but what she was so dearly hoping to be false.
It had been exactly five days since she had departed from her facility. GLaDOS had not left it alone, instead accompanied by the two testing constructs known simply as Blue and Orange. Well, not ‘accompanied’ as much as ‘chaperoning’ the two, she liked to think of it. It helped, she supposed, to have something solid leftover from the facility to hold onto- somethings that wouldn’t talk back to her, at the very least.
At this particular moment, the two were ‘scouting’. She knew exactly where they were, about one mile away in another stretch of field nearby- the group had managed to reach a brittle looking forest just as the sun went down over the hazy gray horizon.
GLaDOS had perched herself primly in a cluster of dry trees, the brightness of her optic beam lowered but still scanning the area around her almost lazily. This was a million times more preferable to attempting to hide her chassis beneath the line of the wheat stalks of the field- she much preferred walls and enclosed spaces to wide open areas.
It gave her time to calculate some of the more… alarming things she had come across since surfacing. The lack of wildlife around her, be it human or animal, had been alarming- some of her previous feeds had revealed insect like things crawling sluggishly on the ground, and unidentified shapes in the sky, but upon actually reaching the surface, there was absolutely nothing to be seen during her five-day trek. Also alarming (Less or more-so she couldn’t tell) was the absolutely staggering amount of radiation that permeated the ground. If she hadn’t seen the things on the feeds herself, she wouldn’t have thought it possible that something could live with such a high concentration.
She leaned against one of the trees, listening to the creak of the wood and waiting for the return of Blue and Orange while she glanced between the horizon and the moon and finding herself hating the lack of sound so, so very much.
