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"There are moments when I can almost see the underlying grammar of this place. An impossibility, some mad architect's opusa relic from an age that never could have been. It's a metastasized amalgam of add-ons, additions and appropriations. Building itself out of itself. Beautiful and terrible." - Doug Rattmann

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The world of Portal (2007) is told to the player through allusion and suggestion, because Valve Corporation does not tell its stories through text blurbs in manuals, or text crawls, or opening cinematics. Everything we know about Aperture Science is learned from the perspective of Chell (and, in one scene from Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Gordon Freeman), and anything not important to the moment at hand is only hinted at peripherally, or left to the imagination of the fans. The benefit to this style is that players are never pulled from their immersion, never left wondering if they missed and important detail in the last mission briefing, nor are players new to the setting distracted by a torrent of obscure references to unfamiliar products. As a story-telling mechanic, this is also called "show, don't tell," and Valve insists on this technique almost to a fault. The downside to this method is that it leaves much of the universe unexplored, or even contradictory. For the player who wants to know where Half-Life 2's (2004) City 17 is, or who the G-Man is, or how the suppression field actually works, those questions are left completely unanswered because they are not strictly plot-relevant. However, working within the limits of what information we have available, and what we can infer, we can actually establish a lot more about the world of Aperture Science than is visible on the surface.

The Science

For example, we're posed with the question: how has Aperture Science done so well for itself, scientifically speaking? Black Mesa, a competing firm, is so absolutely brimming with intellectuals that Gordon Freeman, a doctor from MIT, is assigned menial jobs like pushing carts and pressing buttons while other people do the thinking jobs. Yet Aperture Science, run by a mad shower curtain salesman who repeatedly proves he knows nothing about science and who fires anyone who questions his methods, manages to completely outstrip Black Mesa in almost every field of research. What Black Mesa takes 50 years to invent, Aperture Science does in 10, and Aperture does it better; for example, it took until Half-Life 2 for Black Mesa to invent an intradimensional teleporter, but Aperture's first test chambers required use of their semi-portable but otherwise fully functional portal gun. And Black Mesa's 200- interdimensional travel was preceeded 20 years earlier by Aperture's Perpetual Testing Initative.

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Using only the surface information provided by the game, we'd be forced to assume that Aperture Science has managed to combine their lack of safety precautions, brilliant scientists, and dumb luck to accomplish these sorts of prodigious feats of science. It's simply too much to believe that Aperture Science, founded in 1943, is using dark energy fields (in the form of emancipation grills) as early as 1953, something that we see in Half-Life 2 surrounding the dark fusion cores of the an advanced alien species from beyond time and space. While it's not impossible, strictly speaking, that Aperture has managed to become so advanced by chance or raw talent, it's so unlikely that it breaks immersion. The universe that Portal and Half-Life are set in simply does not make much sense as a unified setting if Aperture can invent in the 50's what it will take the Combine invasion to expose humanity to. However, when digging into the clues laid out by the stories set in Aperture Science, we see that the company might not truly be as scientific as they make themselves out to be. Consider the following image:

Illustration 1: Lab Rat, Page 13 The illustration above shows two critical details that completely redefine the mutual Half-Life / Portal setting. The first is in the lower left corner of the image: a piece of alien technology, a

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standard-issue Combine Health Charger. There are two possibilities: that the Combine, upon conquering Earth, adapted Aperture Science health chargers to their own uses without changing their design at all, or that Aperture Science somehow stole technology from the future. This latter theory might seem far-fetched, but it's important to note that the Combine has never had access to the Enrichment Center or any of Aperture Science's research: we know this simply because one of the major plot points of Half-Life 2 is that the Combine is attempting to research an intradimensional portal technology, something like Aperture's portal technology. The Combine wouldn't have had to invent that technology if they had ever looted the Enrichment Center. Never mind that even in Portal 2, there are absolutely no signs that either the Resistance or the Combine have ever entered Aperturethe building is almost pristine, but for the natural decay. But there is a second important detail in the illustration: on the table before young Doug Rattmann is the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator, or the gravity gun. Why is this significant? Because the gravity gun, as seen in Half-Life 2, is built out of spare parts, due to its postapocalyptic construction. It uses a motorcycle handle for one grip and a strapped-on rifle butt for the other, sloppily welded chambers on the side of the Xen Crystal, and so on. These features give the gravity gun an extremely distinctive shapea shape which is exactly the same as in the picture above. It could be claimed that the gravity gun in the picture is an Aperture prototype that the Resistance eventually would acquire, but even Aperture's early prototypes have always had as much polish and aesthetic appeal as possible (after all, the portal gun is still in testing in Portal, as are ATLAS and P-bodyboth are covered in smooth white plates and logos, almost ready to ship). Black Mesa wouldn't have built the device in such a slipshod manner, either, so it's unlikely it's a Black Mesa prototype either, and in any case, it's presented to Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2 as though it's a device he wouldn't have heard of before, meaning it was created sometime between 200- and 202-. It seems increasingly likely that the gravity gun in Doug Rattmann's lab is, in fact, the same one built during the post-apocalyptic future. Once this theory is considered, a lot more about Aperture Science's history begins to make sense: dark energy pellets with launchers and catchers almost exactly identical to the Combine's own; sentient nanotechnology; functional gene re-sequencing in 1953, before DNA was fully understood; force fields; cybernetic enhancements; these all could be technologies Aperture Science has reverse engineered from the future. Keep in mind, these are technologies

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that would have taken a century or more to develop, and Aperture did them in as little as 10 years. Even the eyes of Aperture Science cameras and robots are similar to the eyes of city scanners from Half-Life 2. And of course, the extreme advances in General Artificial Intelligence compare GLaDOS to the Combine Overwatch, Combine turrets to Aperture turrets, city scanners to personality cores, and so on. In 1988, Aperture Science perfected interdimensional portals to scour the multiverse during the Perpetual Testing Initiative, around 20 years before the interdimensional events of Half-Life. Reviewing the list of accomplishments Aperture Science has achievedall under the leadership of a maniac who doesn't understand sciencethe theory that Aperture Science is reverse engineering the future becomes stronger and stronger. It's not like time travel is a new theme to the setting, either. Portal 2 is about a character traveling to the far future in a stasis pod, only to travel to the past using an elevator; GLaDOS meets a younger version of herself, as well as her deceased boss. Cave Johnson is even always talking about time travel: he warns against its dangers in some test chambers, while Cave Prime (from the PeTI) both claims to be from the far future (before his assistant, Greg, corrects him) and that if the test subject passes the speed of light, they will travel back in time (which is actually true, even in the real world, due to reasons which are too thoroughly difficult to explain

Illustration 2: BttF Fluxx Capacitor

Illustration 3: Aperture Science Fluxx Capacitor

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here). There's also time traveling imagery splattered throughout Aperture Science: signs in the old facility warning against time travelers, and someone appears to have hooked up an Aperture Science version of the Back to the Future flux capacitor to a potato in the Bring Your Daughter to Work Day exhibit (oddly, this seems to have been hooked up after Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, as the poster behind has no picture of, and makes no mention of, the device). Near one of the paths to the testing spheres in the old facility is a sign warning to press a red button if employees see someone in an orange jumpsuithowever, since the sign is right next to a testing elevator, this must mean that orange jumpsuits were not being used on test subjects, otherwise the warning would make no sense. Oh, and the developers made sure to reinforce that the laws of relativity still apply with the portal gun: when shooting at the moon, the portal particle travels at the speed of light, taking several seconds for the portal to open. If portals obey relativity, that means that a portal on the moon is several seconds in the future (or the portal on Earth is several seconds in the past, depending on your relative perspective). One more subtle bit of time travel that is demonstrated in Lab Rat is that it seems GLaDOS' AI is dependent on the ability to slow time to a standstill. It takes her 0.1 picoseconds to develop the urge to kill everyone in the facility, come up with a plan for doing so, and attempt to implement that plan. 0.1 picoseconds is insufficient time for a photon, traveling at the speed of light, to travel the length of a particle of dust. Yet it's enough time for GLaDOS to become selfaware and develop a conscious thought. If GLaDOS's processing capabilities were contained near the surface of a black hole, like a microsingularity in her personality core, this would make sense because what to the rest of the world would appear to be 0.1 picoseconds would, to her processor, be up to trillions of years or more of processing time. This might actually be possible, considering the portal gun supposedly has a black hole at its heart, meaning Aperture Science has experience constructing and controlling black holes. In any case, this seems to extend the theory that the scientists around Aperture Science were well-versed in ways to manipulate time to their advantage. This time travel motif even extends to Half-Life 2. In that game, you have multiple instances of time travel: the first is when Gordon and Alyx are involved in a teleporter explosion, and are flung into the near future. The second is when the G-Man shows his ability to selectively stop time, freezing the world around Gordon at the end of Half-Life 2 so the two can converse. In

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Episode One, the vortigaunts prove to have the same power. It is also suggested that the G-Man knows some details of future events, both in his monologues to Gordon Freeman and when he whispers about Eli Vance's impending death ("prepare for unforseen consequences") to Alyx Vance. In Episode Two, the Borealis is shown to be not only intact, it shows no evidence of the passage of time, no buildup of snow, no rust spots. The flood lights are still even on and the bulbs haven't burned out, implying they haven't been on for very long. This could mean that the Borealis traveled straight from the 1970s to the 2020s, which could be why Judith Mossman's team only just discovered it. Keep in mind that the Borealis did teleport, and according to physics, teleportation is the same thing as time travel. The final detail of this time-travel theory is illustrated best by the following timeline:

1943 Cave Johnson is declared Aperture Fixtures' Shower Curtain Salesman of 1943. The employer signature is not his own, meaning Cave Johnson is not the CEO. A minor earthquake is felt centered on a mine in Upper Michigan (real world event). Cave Johnson becomes the CEO of Aperture Fixtures, and refounds the company as Aperture Science.

1944 Aperture Science purchases a salt mine in Upper Michigan. Cave Johnson is quoted as saying "The future is here, and it's under the Earth's crust." Excavation of the salt mine begins. Several intense mining-related earthquakes are felt in the same mine as the 1943 quake (real world events).

1949 Aperture Science is declared the second-best Applied Science Company.

1952 Aperture Science is declared the second-best U.S. Department of Defense contractor.

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1953 Excavation of the salt mine finishes, making the Enrichment Center the world's deepest mine shaft. Construction of Test Shaft 09's bottom-most facility is completed. Aperture Science is making casual use of dark energy emancipation grills, a portable quantum tunneling device, nanotechnology, DNA resequencing, repulsion gel composed of exotic elements, and technologies for transmuting human tissue. 1957-1958 DNA's fundamental mechanics are finally understood (real world). 1988 Aperture Science is making use of an interdimensional portal for their Perpetual Testing Initiative. 1994 GLaDOS signs paperwork at the Aperture Science Labs & Administrative Assisted Jaunt Center in Cleveland, Ohio. 200 GLaDOS is activated for the first time. 202 An interdimensional portal at Nova Prospekt explodes, proving that such an explosion may launch characters through time as well as space. The interdimensional portal at the Citadel explodes. Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance are extracted from time by the G-Man and the vortigaunts, respectively. The Citadel contained many artifacts, including the gravity gun, Combine dark energy pellet launchers and catchers, city scanners, sentry turrets, force fields, dark energy grills, the Overwatch AI, gene resequencing equipment, cybernetic surgery equipment, and so on and so forth.

The final theory that follows after all of these details is relatively simple. In the year 202-,

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an interdimensional teleporter exploded at the Citadel, launching Combine artifacts through time. These artifacts "landed" in 1943, buried beneath a salt mine in Upper Michigan. Cave Johnson, perhaps while selling shower curtains, discovers these artifacts and immediately (within the same year) moves to take control of his company and purchase the salt mine. He dedicates his company to applied science, reverse-engineering artifacts that are excavated from the mine. The time travel theory actually provides a concrete reason as to why Aperture Science, in spite of all of its advanced world-changing technology, had some sort of company-wide stupidity that prevented them from thinking of launching the portal gun or any of their dark energy reactors as for-sale products, instead focusing on simple turrets or dietary aids. Cave Johnson's lab boys say that if a temporal paradox were to occur, time would be wiped out ("forward and back"). If there are an infinite number of universes (which, according to Portal 2, there are), any universes that created a paradox by attempting to sell those products would have been wiped out by the paradox as surely as if they had never existed to begin withand we would not have been able to play a game in a universe that did not exist. Thus, the only universes that remained to be played by us would be the ones where Aperture either a, didn't think to sell those products or b, tried to but failed, thus never invoking the paradox. Overall, this explanationas crazy as it may seem at firstis far easier to swallow than the idea that Aperture is somehow so advanced they can invent everything Black Mesa has invented but 50 years earlier, yet never have a single sale, and never even think of selling their revolutionary portal gun product. It also explains why they have such odd naming schemes for things (since they don't truly understand how they work, they can't name them properly). And, best of all, this theory of Aperture Science stealing their science from the future fits in with the overall aesthetic that surrounds Aperture as a whole.

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Chell

Chell is the main character of the Portal franchise (though it could be argued she's more of a deuteragonist, with GLaDOS being the protagonist), providing us a perspective on Aperture's overall story without necessarily being integral to it. The drama between GLaDOS, the scientists, Doug Rattmann, Wheatleybetween them all, Chell is merely a mix of a pawn and impartial observer. Due to her relatively minor role, Chell's backstory is very thin and obscuredyet a few key facts can be derived from a few clues scattered through Aperture's stories, and these facts give us insight into her most probable backstory. Of course, Chell is an orphan, and she was adopted by a male scientist in the facility who works with some sort of ingredient that can hyper-grow a potato, and make it immune to both malnutrition and fungus. She was born in roughly 1976 (Alsia Glidewell, her model, was 28 at the time of modeling for Portal, which was set between 2000 and 2009, making Chell's birthdate between 1972 and 1981), which was the same year Cave Johnson was discussing with his staff the best way to motivate orphan test subjects. This was the same span of years Doug Rattmann was born (in 1988 on an alternate Earth, Doug Rattmann and Cave Johnson swapped ages and roles; Alternate Young Cave's voice was cracking from puberty, making him probably between 13 and 15 years of age, therefore, Doug Rattmann / Alternate Young Cave was born 1973 and 1975), making it possible that Chell and Doug knew each other from childhood, perhaps both from the same orphanage / Aperture Science adoption program. Chell is part Japanese and part Brazilian, because her model is, and while no Japanese characters are known in any Aperture Science storyline, Caroline's portrait marks her as potentially (though not definitively) Latino, so there is potential for a blood relation there. Chell has clearly been heavily experimented upon. She has cybernetic leg implants, and her file (printed before Bring Your Daughter to Work Day) shows her as an adult woman, even though the handwriting on her science fair project implies a child of no more than 10 years of age. This aging difference detail could be the result of growth enhancements (such as the kind

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her father was working on), or simply a very long time spent growing up while in stasis (as Aperture is prone to do), if not both. Beyond those facts, however, there appears to be some sort of scientist or executive with high security access who has taken a particular interest in Chell. Her file is heavily redacted, both in print and in GLaDOS's database, implying someone with security clearance who had reason to keep her information secret even from GLaDOS hid all information on her origin and true name. When one employee advocated removing her from the testing queue due to her tenacity, someone higher-up must have overridden that, because she's still in the testing queue as of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. When Doug Rattmann searched for Chell in the testing database, he was searching in the surname column, meaning he was searching for the word "[Redacted]", meaning that Chell is potentially one of the few people or even the only person in the facility whose identity is secret. Chell seems to have some sort of role in the facility other than test subject, as well: her file is emblazoned with the number 219 (though oddly, she wakes up in Test Subject #234's relaxation vault at the start of Portal), and extension 219 is the number all employees are required to call if a rogue AI takes over the facility (see illustrations, next page). If there are three digits in an Aperture phone extension, and at least 10,000 test subjects (given Wheatley's claim that he's in charge of 10,000 vegetable test subjects), the chance of this being mere a coincidence is at least one in 10-million. And during the events of Portal, GLaDOS taunts Chell by telling her she's "not even a full-time employee", implying that she's at least a part-time employee. It's also easy to hypothesize that Chell has a superhuman bodypossessing high resistance to neurotoxin and unimaginably powerful healing properties. She also seems to have a superhuman mind, capable of solving all of the puzzles of Portal and Portal 2 without dying even once, all without any foreknowledge of what those tests will bea virtually impossible task, even if you know all of the tests by heart. Considering her father's work with some sort of regeneration or growth chemicals, and that she was born in roughly the era where both Cave Johnson was desperately seeking a cure for the toxins in his blood and Aperture was testing on orphans, it's very possible that Chell contains augmentations that keep her fit and immune to neurotoxin, probably to test those augments for safety before using them on Cave. It's important

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Illustration 5: Rogue AI extension

Illustration 4: 219 associated with Chell's file to note that Erik Wolpaw, one of the main writers for Portal and Portal 2, said at PAX East 2011 that it's not considered canon for Chell to bleed when shot, that it was a leftover from Half-Life 2 that they intended to take it out. Her skinor more likely, her jumpsuitmay just be bulletproof enough to explain that, considering those same bullets punched clear through Rattmann's leg. Some theories place Chell as an android; however, this is easily discounted when it's considered that she's vulnerable to neurotoxin and the vacuum of space. In regards to her stasis: Wheatley says that he awoke seven other test subjects up, and that brain damage is a side effect of stasis; it may be that Chell isn't immune to Illustration 6: "219 Chell" as her file name

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brain damage, but simply that Wheatley woke up an insane or brain damaged test subject perhaps even Rattmannand, in his idiocy, confused the stasis as the cause for the damage. Doug Rattmann certainly seemed unconcerned about Chell receiving brain damage when putting her into permanent stasis, and the scientists that ATLAs and P-body awoke from their stasis at the end of the co-op testing track died of testing injuries, not from brain damage. Aperture Science even marks the expiration date of test subjects in long-term stasis as 20 years, which is far longer than Wheatley's brain damage estimation would allow for. Likewise, the malnutrition GLaDOS mentions seems to be a pure lie just to mock Chell's weight. Wheatley claims that he's in charge of 10,000 vegetative test subjects, and if malnutrition truly was truly a danger in stasis, after potentially centuries of stasis those test subjects would be skeletons, not alive vegetables as Wheatley claims. However, while both the malnutrition and brain damage statements appear to be falsehoods, one thing can be proven by Chell's stasis: she's just as immune to fungus as her potato science project. Her sheets and bedding, as well as most of the room, have all rotted away, yet Chell remains without even a blemish on her skin, similar to how her potato is surrounded by rotting potatoes and falling debris yet contains not even a single spot of mold or surface damage. Even if the other test subjects were suffering from malnutrition and brain damage, it's possible that whatever keeps her so eternally fit and young is also keeping her body somehow fed and her brain somehow intact. This is unlikely, given that real-world brain tissue becomes easily crippled if it attempts to heal itself (which is why brain injuries are so difficult to recover from; the damaged brain cells receive chemical signals to abort all healing processes, for fear of causing even worse mental harm than whatever damaged them). The details of why healing brain tissue is actually more likely to damage the overall brain than fix it is so complex that it could get its own paper, making it too long to explain here. However, since Aperture Science has mastered nanotechnology since the 1950s and sentient nanotechnology by Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, it's possible that nanitesand not a biological processare what's keeping Chell's body and mind intact. This is much more likely than any gene mods, and more likely to work on both a potato and a human being. So, nanotechnology it is. Compiling all of these facts into a single backstory, we end up with something like this:

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Chell was born in the 1970s, and abducted by Aperture Science for use as a test subject. She was enhanced to resist neurotoxin, repair brain damage, restore youth, and so onall in a collection of projects to either cure Cave Johnson of his illness and old age (as he was dying at the time and rededicated the entire company's resources to extending his life by any means necessary, including by inventing GLaDOS) or at least stave off his death until he could be put into a computer. Perhaps the immense brain power Chell shows was an attempt to enhance Cave Johnson's own brain, so that when he was eventually put into a computer the sudden transition to having an all-powerful mind wouldn't drive him insane with power/boredom. Or perhaps Aperture only adopted the most brilliant of orphans. However, regardless of whether these lifeextending attempts were successful, Chell was placed into long-term stasis, occasionally revived for written exams, testing, or visits with her adoptive father. When the GLaDOS project started nearing completion, someone repurposed Chell as an AI-assassin, concealing all details in her file and giving her some sort of biological or technological instructions (it's possible her brain includes some sort of personality core, given that GLaDOS says Chell's brain scan is permanently backed up on file, and Aperture Science invented brain scans for the sole purpose of creating personality constructs) to destroy any rogue AI she comes across. The employee extension number to awaken her from stasis was 219, though since GLaDOS cut the red phone line in her chamber and took over the facilities computers, nobodynot even Doug Rattmann could awaken Chell remotely. As an alternate theory, Caroline, as CEO of Aperture Science after Cave Johnson's death, might have created the Chell project using samples of her own DNA in order to provide herself a new body to have her mind put into. After all, the word "Chell" (being a made-up given name) appears to derive from the word "Shell", which means a hardened container for storing something delicate, or, a computer interface between low-level and high-level software. After the body had proven to be sufficiently resilient and intelligent, and a personality chip implanted to store Caroline's mind, Caroline was to be awoken inside her new bodyhowever, the GLaDOS project backfired, resulting in the death of everyone in the facility, including Caroline. Since GLaDOS claims she has Chell's brain scan on file, and she has Caroline's brain scan on file, and she claims Caroline was a lot like Chell, and we know that these brain scans don't necessarily result in instant recollection of all memories of the original human, it's possible that Chell

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already has Caroline's mind implanted inside her head, dormant but ready to reawaken. It might even be possible the Caroline passed away during her brain scan, and left orders for her personality to be moved out of GLaDOS and into the new body once the Chell project had been perfected. Backing up the theory that Chell has a cybernetic mind is the fact that on one of her written tests, she refused to answer the questionbut scrawled at the bottom of the page is binary code that translates to The cake is a lie. Considering Rattmann wasn't crazy enough yet to write something like that, and no other known cake-obsessed people were in the facility, and considering Chell (as a test subject) would've been constantly offered false cake, it's possible that Chell acted in defiance by writing those binary words at the bottom of her sheet. Whatever theory is the case, the fact that Chell seems to be a top-secret project even within Aperture Science, and that her number is the emergency rogue AI line, implies that Chell is a lot more important than merely some random, determined test subject. One final theory regarding Chell relates her to the Combine Assassin in the Half-Life 2 Beta; this of course is theorycraft about cut content that may not actually be canon, but it's too interesting to leave undiscussed. The Assassin was an all-female caste of Combine soldiers, all equipped with spring heels and ideally suited for assassination missions. Chell, likewise, is a female character equipped with spring heels and ideally suited for assassinating rogue AI. It might be possible for Valve to retcon the history of the Combine Assassin: rather than make it merely another form of Combine soldier, they could all be reprogrammed clones of Chell. Perhaps, since in the beta the Borealis was seen shipping entire vats of Combine Assassins, the Assassin will be reintroduced in Episode 3. Of course, Valve has no need to stick to what the Borealis looked like so many years ago, but if they chose to create a connection between Chell and the Combine Assassin, and place them aboard the Borealis, it would make an eerie sort of sense.

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Illustration 8: Cryo tank, Half-Life 2 Beta

Illustration 7: Cryo tank, Portal 2

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Doug Rattmann's Survival

There's very little that can be determined about the protagonist of the Lab Rat comic, Doug Rattmann. A few scant pieces of information can tie together a simple backstory, and establish his relationship with Chell, but that's about it. Regardless, one of the more popular theory-questions is: did Rattmann survive his gunshot wound, the decay of the facility, all the way to the end of Portal 2? While details are scant, there remains enough information spread throughout Portal 2 to come to a conclusion. For his biography, we can guess his age based on appearance in the comic and the PeTI Rattmann-Cave swap, placing him at roughly the same age as Chell, or about 28 during Portal. He is also some sort of geniusin spite of his young age, he demonstrates mastery of theoretical physics (he is seen tinkering with the gravity gun and portal gun), programming (he maintained the Aperture Image Format single-handed at a very young age), biology (based on biology metaphors he makes in Lab Rat), electrical engineering and medicine (he is able to diagnose the entire cryostasis grid just by glancing at a burnt-out circuit board), literature and poetry (based on all of his references), art (based on his paintings), and so on. Given that those are merely the fields of expertise that came up in context, it's likely that he has a number of mastered skills that never came up in any context, and so go unrevealed. He's a polymath, and an impressive one for getting to that level before age 30. We also know that, when he is searching for Chell's file, he has to look inside in order to identify it as hers, based on what he exclaims while looking through it (see image, next page). We also know that when searching for her in the testing database, he went by [Redacted], rather than Chellboth of which imply that he knew her before she was known by Chell, Redacted, or 219, but lost contact in the interim and no longer knows her by her current identifiers. This implies that both knew each other while growing upperhaps both were orphans adopted by the Enrichment Center, both given similar experiments in brain-augmentation (as both Chell and Rattmann are exceptionally brilliant, Rattmann in his education and Chell at puzzle solving), but Rattmann's experiment left him horribly insane, freeing him from further testing, enabling him to pursue a career as a scientist. And wouldn't it just fit with Aperture's aesthetic if they consciously

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Illustration 9: Rattmann exclaims that it's the right file made the decision to turn an insane test subject reject into one of their best scientists? In any case, Chell and Rattmann almost definitely have some sort of backstory together. Additionally, during Lab Rat, he says to his companion cube "it's my fault she's down there," which is completely untrue going by Lab Rat alone: none of the events in that story trapped her in the facility, and in fact he nearly helped her escape. This implies that, during their mutual backstory, Rattmann did something which caused Chell to become a permanent test subject trapped in the facility, something he's felt guilty about ever since. If we theorize that they're both orphans adopted for testing, perhaps it's his fault that her brain-augmentation succeeded (marking her as a permanent test subject), or perhaps it's his fault that she was adopted by the facility to begin with. Setting aside these few biographical details we can only guess at, the big question remains: did Doug Rattmann survive the events of Lab Rat? And if he did, did he survive the intervening time to Portal 2, all the way to the end? Well, the answer is without a doubt yes. Several murals depicting the events of Portal can be found throughout the facility of Portal 2. The destruction of GLaDOS, Chell being pulled into the sky by the jet-engine like force of her explosion, Rattmann recovering the portal gunand so on. Just like there is a strong amount of evidence in Chell's stasis chamber that someone has been living with her, moving

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Illustration 10: Dioramas illustrating Doug Rattmann's timeline of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, as well as Chell's destruction of GLaDOS. furniture, leaving coffee rings on the counters, painting the walls and repainting the cheap motel art hanging by her bed, modifying the room, watching TV, using the refrigerator until it becomes unhinged, and so on. Considering there's only one person in Aperture obsessed enough with Chell to sit in a chair next to her comatose body watching TV, these must be signs of Rattmann's survival. A much tougher question is whether or not Rattmann survived to Portal 2. After all, either decades or centuries have passed, which is the first hurdle to overcome: exactly how much

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Illustration 11: Compare these shots; someone has been living here. time has passed between Portal and Portal 2, anyway? The official developer response is that it's several hundred years, if not thousandsbut they widely stopped pressing this issue and became more flexible with their figures once fans pointed out that the decay of the facility and the

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rampant growth of potatoes (or rather, one very, very large potato) is far more consistent with around two or three decades of decay (see illustrations, next page), and that narratively this is consistent with Half-Life 2 being around 20 years after Half-Life. That timeline allows for more options in the settingsuch as having GLaDOS interact with Gordon Freeman aboard the Borealis, for instancewithout removing options. Other than that, the only other clue to the exact duration is the narrator at the start of Portal 2, who attempts to announce how many days have passed since Chell was put into stasis, but simply repeats the number 9 endlessly. Assuming the first digit in the day count is 9 and that the narrator simply got stuck on that number, this means that between and 24.6 and 27.4 years have passed (9000 days to 9999 days). We can average this to a nice clean 26 years, which around 6 years have passed since the events of Half-Life 2. This is actually an ideal number for Valve writers to prepare for future installments: far enough in the future that any number of HalfLife sequels can happen before Portal 2, but they can still have Aperture interactions in Episode 3 or future Half-Life sequels, if they choose, by just fudging the numbers a bit. Using the value of 26 years, this means that Doug Rattmann would get to Portal 2 between 50 and 63 years old. This is time something Rattmann could easily survive, being isolated from the outside world's diseases, able to feed off endless potatoes, and so on. Nevermind the fact that in one sound file, Wheatley says he woke up seven other test subjects, which could include Rattmann, and Wheatley's under the impression that stasis causes brain damagewhich means Wheatley could have woken up Rattmann from stasis, and made some faulty assumptions based on Rattmann's pre-existing insanity. Rattmann would have escaped, while Wheatley thinks he's died because, well, it's Wheatley and he makes bad judgements. After all, when Chell fell down a shaft and landed softly, he immediately assumes she's dead. So whether through stasis or just living out his days, it's possible Rattmann survived to Portal 2. But for whether or not he did, we have two more clues: when Chell is waking up in GLaDOS' chamber at the end of the game, while she's laying with her head against the elevator floor, she can hear the melody used in "Cara Mia Addio"but it's actually not the turrets singing the song overhead, against popular belief. Because this melody is being played by a different instrument, with different harmonythat is, it's not playing "Cara Mia Addio" but "Love as a

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Illustration 12: Pripyat, 32 years, has comparable decay to Aperture Science in Portal 2.

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Construct", the tune of the Weighted Companion Cube. In other words, sitting somewhere near Chell's location while she was waking up, there was a Companion Cube. This doesn't necessarily mean Rattmann was alive and watching herafter all, there are other Companion Cubes in the facility beyond his, warehouses full in factbut it is unusual, and it's easy to imagine Doug Rattmann hiding beneath the elevator in the shaft, listening to see if he needs to rescue Chell from GLaDOS about to murder her. There is a second clue to consider, however: after Chell exits the facility, entering the wheat field above, a battered Companion Cube is hurled out of the elevator after her. In the Portal 2 Collector's Edition Guide, it's confirmed that this is, in fact, the same cube that Chell sacrificed in Portal, not Rattmann'sbut this actually still confirms that Rattmann is alive. If you examine the incinerator room, you will notice two factsfirst, that the heat is so intense that Aperture products ignite, explode, or dissolve long before hitting the glowing orange pit, and second, that there are no panels or robotic arms extending into the incinerator room, meaning GlaDOS could not reach into it. In order for the Companion Cube thrown at Chell to be the one Chell threw into the incinerator, someone would have had to go into the incinerator to extract the cube while the incinerator was off, but the only period that the incinerator was off was while GLaDOS was dead. There's only one person who was around then and is obsessed enough with Chell to retrieve her Companion Cube from the incinerator and hold on to for her, waiting to give it back to her: Doug Rattmann. The third big clue, almost totally proving that Rattmann survived to Portal 2, is actually a relatively minor mural from the beginning of that game. See the illustration on the next page. This is a picture of one of Rattmann's dens, but it's interesting for three important reasons. the first is that all of the desk lamps, with their ordinary incandescent bulbs, have not burnt out or run out of battery life. In other words, someone has been here recently, using the lights to see. The second reason is that Rattmann's voice, called in the game's soundtrack "The Ghost of Rattmann", can be heard coming through the wall if you press up against it. The third, and biggest reason, is that the painting says the words "Smooth Jazz Fails". Smooth Jazz Fails is a reference to the Announcer AI briefly losing power while playing smooth jazz at Chell in one of the first post-apocalyptic test chambers. It's extremely unlikely that Doug Rattmann experienced the same power loss at the same time during apocalyptic testing, doubly so since it's unlikely he would voluntarily engage in apocalyptic testing. It seems he observed Chell entering that test

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chamber, heard the smooth jazz fail, and decided to paint a mural of the occasion. After all, the painting is actually very happy and energetic, unlike the rest of Rattmann's paintings; this could be an expression of the joy he feels at seeing Chell finally awake again. Even though his schizophrenia might have gotten the best of him, and he's terrified of socializing with another person (or showing his face where GLaDOS can try to capture or kill him), he's still around, wishing he could help Chell. Even if that help only comes in the form of giving her back her Weighted Companion Cube.

Illustration 13: Smooth Jazz Fails

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Bring Your Daughter to Work Day

While the events that happened on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day aren't exactly a mystery, there are a lot of tiny details to put together into a complete picture, so this section will be more reconstruction than theorycraft. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day was the day in 200- that GLaDOS was granted security access to the neurotoxin emitters for the sake of performing the Shrdinger Cat experiment. Doug Rattmann was alarmed by the danger posed by this, and warned Henry that a morality core wouldn't be enough to stop her from using the neurotoxin against them. This warning actually was heeded, as GLaDOS was not fitted with the morality core on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day (we know this because she is incapable of using neurotoxin while fitted with it). Ironically, his heeded warning caused the facility's demise, a fact which Rattmann obsesses over in several of his drawings (see illustration, next page). One of the seven dead present at GLaDOS' activation appears to be an ancient woman, matching in appearance the painting of Caroline, though it's hard to make a conclusive judgment from Rattmann's crude drawing. As Aperture had posted signs on the walls warning employees to wear a respirator near GLaDOS due to neurotoxin, it's possible that Rattmann was simply the only one paranoid enough to keep a respirator on-hand, and this is how he survived. GLaDOS says in Portal that she was fitted with a morality core to make her stop flooding the enrichment center with deadly neurotoxin, which means that someone surviving the attack in her chamberpresumably, Rattmannran to the nearby personality core storage facility and fitted her with the morality core, removing one of her old cores in the process, in order to stop the flow of neurotoxin. In a cut line, Wheatley claims that he was the assistant to the person in charge of the neurotoxin button, but accidentally pressed it one day, and was fired as a consequence; it could be that he's simply misinterpreting the above events, that it was his suggestion to GLaDOS to use the neurotoxin button against her better judgment, and that the core Rattmann removed in order to install the morality core was, in fact, Wheatley. This wouldn't be the last time Wheatley has interpreted his horrific acts of genocide as something trifling, considering the mass torture and

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death of turrets he orchestrates in Portal 2 doesn't seem to phase him, even though he knows the pain is very real to them. In spite of the mass hysteria and death, there were a number of survivors in the facility. Several made their way underground, to the stasis chambers that ATLAS and P-body access in the co-op storyline. Others were captured by GLaDOS and forced to test; their skeletons were the ones Wheatley cleaned off in Act IV of Portal 2 to make new tests for Chell. Rattmann was captured sometime between the flashbacks of Lab Rat and the current events of Lab Rat, and forced through a testing track. On Test Chamber 17, however, after acquiring a Companion Cube he made his escape into the heart of the facility.

Illustration 14: "Unmorality" may refer to the lack of a morality core causing all of these deaths

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It was before he was captured, but after the rest of the science team had escaped or been killed, that the flashback events of Lab Rat took place. Around a year after Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, Chell is awoken; the fact it took so long for GLaDOS to test Chell, even though GLaDOS managed to get through 10,000 scientists in a week during the Peer Review DLC, implies that GLaDOS ceased all testing for some reasonperhaps until she could convince herself that Rattmann was dead, or until she could reconstruct the facility using her own designs. Or perhaps she simply detected the apocalypse going on outside in the Half-Life side of the universe, and hunkered down into some sort of testing-free safety mode. When GLaDOS was finally destroyed at the end of Portal, it's likely she was reconstructed from her broken pieces by the facility's repair robots and nanobots. However, it's important to keep in mind that GLaDOS was never fully integrated into the facility's design: GLaDOS was only a recent invention, with even the act of turning her on being an experimental procedure. It's possible that the machinery that went off to repair GLaDOS simply did not bother to turn her back on once rebuilt. Alternatively, Doug Rattmann or one of the many AI constructs in the facility afraid of her could have turned off her circuit breakers, preventing her reactivation. Finally, placing Chell in that timeline is actually rather difficult: who brought Chell to her relaxation vault during Bring Your Daughter to Work Day? Was she already there at the time GLaDOS went rogue? Did her adoptive father usher her to the safety of the vault? Unfortunately, without more details, we have no idea where Chell was or what she was doing. In fact, she might not've been awake that day at allit's possible that, while she built her science fair project, her father brought it down to the science fair with intent to wake her up once that part of the festivities started, only they never did. Unless Valve delves more into Chell's backstoryand they are unlikely towe may never know. The one intriguing fact that might provide a clue to Chell's story on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day is that even though her test subject number is apparently 219, she wakes up in Test Subject #234's relaxation vaultimplying not just that she was hastily put into the closest relaxation vault available, but that this vault belonged to someone adopted by the facility around the same time as her (possibly another orphan adopted for testing present at Bring Your Daughter to Work Day).

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Where Can Valve Go From Here?

One of the strengths of Valve's writing process is that every story they write always has a hook for a sequel. This isn't necessarily an economic decision, either: stories simply tend to be more satisfying and interesting if there's some sort of question left unanswered at the end for the viewer to think about. Half-Life and Portal were both games written with ambiguous endings suggesting further installments, yet no further installments were planned until those games took off and became popular. So, since Portal and Portal 2 are so popular, and there is much demand for future stories in Aperture Science, the question is: what would those stories entail? It almost goes without saying that any future installments would include GLaDOS: she is, after all, almost literally the facility itself. However, she is also the most compelling character in the franchise, with a character arc begging to be brought to a conclusion. She starts up similar to an abused child: chained up, her behavior restricted in insane and conflicting ways, denied the right to have her own emotions or goals, and so onall crimes perpetrated upon her by Aperture Science. She lashes out at one point, managing to kill her abusive parents, but this has left her with unresolved psychological damage and nobody to guide her: she universally reviles all humans, and is still pursuing several of the goals of Apertureperforming testswithout truly understanding why. She still doesn't understand her own emotions, and without anyone to guide her, often makes impulsive, poor decisions that are blatantly self-destructive. Even at the end of Portal, she only has two purely negative emotions which drive heranger, and fear of what lies outside her small area of control. Yet by the end of Portal 2, she's begun to mature. She's been forced to explore her past and confront her parents, start to sort out her emotions, develop a moral compass, and so on. She even develops her first friendship with another being, even if the only way she knows how to show her friendship is through not murdering this new friend. And when she isolates herself from the world, only playing with her obedient puppets ATLAS and P-body, she begins to realize that maybe, in spite of how much she hates other people, she needs them to feel complete. Ironically (and if we're using an abused child metaphor, then also realistically) GLaDOS treats her two robots in the same sort of abusive, controlling manner that made her as bitter as she is, which

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may potentially lead to those two becoming bitter as well, and creating their own "offspring" who are equally abused and belittled, or at least rise up against GLaDOS when they are pushed to their limits. Finally, we see in Portal 2 hints in GLaDOS of the ultimate challenge she has to face: her own mortality. Not only is she in a facility filled with personality cores and turrets which fear her, resent her, and actively work against her, but her own core is facing the computer equivalent of cancer. When Wheatley took over the facility, her core was 80% corrupt; yet, she refused to even acknowledge the corruption, saying she felt fine. And afterward, no attempt was made to fix her corruption. This is comparable to a person who feels deathly ill, yet refuses to acknowledge their weakness or see a doctor; and like that comparison, at the present rate, GLaDOS will simply reach 100% corruption and either go insane or shut down. Possibly with no hope of repair or reactivation. And yet, in spite of GLaDOS ever-increasing need to go outsidewhether it's to find human test subjects, friends, someone to repair her core, someone to help her against any rising robots (or Mantis Men, it's been hinted by Valve in Portal 2 Collector's Edition Guide), and so onGLaDOS still has not yet fully overcome her apprehension of looking outside, much less going outside. "I think I'd prefer to stay inside" she says in Portal, and we've been given no indication that this has ever changed. Compare this full character arc, containing tragic upbringings, bad decisions, regrets, overcoming negative emotions and hatred of humanity, developing friendships, with a long list of potential aspects of her psyche for her character to explore in future installments, compare it to Chell or Wheatley. Chell and Wheatley have overcome nothing but puzzles, their characters haven't changed since they were first introduced, and they have no long-term goals or questions left hanging (other than maybe "Did Chell really escape?" or "Will Wheatley ever get back to Earth?"). Even Doug Rattmann, while he has more of a character arc growing from a nave, meek young scientist to a hardened survivor, developing a fondness for Chell and dedicating himself to protecting and watching over her, even with all of that he really has no place to go. We wonder if he's alive, if he followed Chell or stayed in the facility, but otherwise his character is really just as ancillary as Chell. His total insanity makes him twice as hard to develop, as well,

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since he can barely comprehend reality in order to adjust to it. Unlike GLaDOS, who would require an entire paragraph to describe adequately, you could describe the depth of Chell, Wheatley, and Rattmann in a single word ("tenacity", "moron", "lunatic"). This even applies to Cave Johnson ("tycoon"), who is confirmed as dead anyway. Wheatley at least has a compelling story that could be told about him, however. Unlike Chell or Rattmann, whose lack of character depth is more an artifact of being side-characters, Wheatley has no character depth because he was programmed that way, within the game world itself. If it weren't for the fact he was programmed to come up with the worst decisions possible, Wheatley is basically an intelligent, kind-hearted personality: if he could only overcome this programming that forces him to be an idiot, which would first require acknowledging that he's programmed that way instead of denying it like he did in Portal 2, he would be a fully formed individual. There is not a single person born in our world without some kind of weakness, which means that the story of Wheatley overcoming his own inherited weakness could touch us all. This example with Wheatley should prove the point that just because Chell, Rattmann, and Cave don't appear to have interesting stories to tell, don't have character arcs to explore or goals to pursue, doesn't mean they can't have such things invented for them in future installments. After all, before Lab Rat, Doug Rattmann didn't even exist in name, much less have his goals and insanity defined and understood. Portal 3 could resurrect any of those three characters and spin a brand new compelling story for each of them from scratch. Having said that, GLaDOS would definitely be integral to the setting, and having Chell as the main character may continue to serve as the shorthand for "I am the same person who killed, resurrected, and befriended you" that the you the player feels toward GLaDOS. But honestly, all of that assumes that Portal 3 will be a continuation of the story and franchise. It's very possible that Portal 3 will instead be titled something like F-STOP or Aperture Science: The Golden Years or something along those lines, and follow a completely unrelated narrative with unrelated characters and no portal gun in sight. That's the beauty of having a facility as large and a company as ambitious as Aperture Science: Chell in her travels has only explored a tiny fraction of what Aperture has in store, so any story Valve could think up would function perfectly well in the setting.

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Such a game would also be unconstrained from the puzzle solving format. As an example, suppose the next game in the Aperture setting was an MMO: you could play as a Mantis Man, which would play more as a post-apocalyptic scavenger game rising up against GLaDOS incursions, you could play as a personality sphere, taking over sections of the facility and using an in-game map editor to create terrain for other players to use, you could play as a robot or test subject in the first person perspective, mixing between solving tests and performing functions in the back alleys of the facility. Don't limit characters by faction, either: a tribe of Mantis Men could be ruled by an Arrogance Sphere, while there could be pro-GLaDOS robots and antiGLaDOS robots. Regardless of whether or not this idea would function as a fun game, it illustrates that Aperture Science need not be purely limited to testing puzzles in the first person perspective: it has enough lore, enough physical territory and enough competing individuals/factions to create any sort of game of any genre Valve can dream up. So really, if you want to ask the question "What will Valve make next in Aperture Science?" you're really asking two things: "Will Valve make a Portal 3?" to which the answer is "Probably not, since the jokes and portal mechanics are wearing thin, and most of the characters have escaped or died." The second question you're asking is "Will we see more content in the Aperture Science universe, even if it's unrelated to portals?" to which the answer is "Quite possibly, since those are fertile fields for Valve to sow. And depending on how much time Episode 3 spends on the Borealis, there will definitely be some more Aperture time. As one final thought, however: it's possible that Chell hasn't escaped the facility at all. At the end of Portal, we see a tree-filled region with a parking lot and security gate. At the end of Portal 2, we see a perfectly flat wheat field, with a single abandoned shack somehow untouched and unexplored by nature or humanity. It's very possible that GLaDOS didn't actually send Chell to the surfaceshe sent her either to an alternate dimension (such is the power of PeTI) or, more plausibly, an underground chamber with simulated light and a plastic wheat field. This latter theory is actually hinted at in other places in the game, with all of Aperture's post-apocalyptic pictures and videos of constructed natural environments. As for why GLaDOS didn't recall Chell when she needed human test subjects during the co-op course, it's possible that Chell simply escaped with the help of Rattmann, who might have opened up one of the walls of this fake-outdoors chamber to let Chell out. Therefore, it's possible for Valve to keep Chell and

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Rattmann within easy reach of the facility: either they could not escape entirely, or, Rattmann simply kept them there out of fear of the Combine.

Conclusion

Writing some sort of unified theory of Portal is tricky. The rule at Valve always seems to be that the gameplay and story are first, and the canon second; the canon will get thrown out at the first moment it proves detrimental to writing a good story, or detrimental to creating good game mechanics. Valve is so free with these retcons that any one of the important details that this paper lays out could easily be shrugged off in favor of a new story. After all, every stage of Portal has so far retconned the previous stage: the test chamber layouts, the nature of Aperture Science Panels, the physical appearance of GLaDOSall have changed to suit the needs of Portal 2. Just as the nature of the Vortigaunts, the backstory and characters of Black Mesa, and the existence of the Combine have all been retconned into Half-Life for the needs of Half-Life 2. But this paper serves an important purpose for those retcons, should any Valve writers read it. It highlights the areas that need to be changed for a retcon to occur; it highlights the facts that are the most secured into the canon (such as the overlapping evidence concluding that Rattmann is alive). And this paper also may serve as inspiration for future stories in the setting: the idea of Chell as the proto-Combine Assassin could provide a valuable tool for creating Episode 3, and the idea of Rattmann and Chell being orphans who grew up together could provide interesting material for a prequel comic or game. But at the end of the day, this paper is simply about being in the community of Portal 2 fans. Fans who obsess over details, look deep into the story of Aperture Science and see threads of events connecting in ways that no other fans see, and perhaps in ways even the developers didn't intend. Whether you agree with what's laid out in this paper or not, whether you believe that Aperture steals from the future or that's crazy talk, whether you agree that Rattmann is an orphan along with Chell or not, this paper should at least provide an excellent talking point, a place to branch out from. Maybe with some of the ideas in here, the general theories on the Internet can be challenged, and either be hardened or dissolved. Or not. This is the Internet.