Wheatley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
epimethean) wrote2013-09-06 12:39 am
epimethean) wrote2013-09-06 12:39 am
APPLICATION: SAVE THE EARTH!?!?!??!?
OOC Information:
Name: Whit
Are you over 15? I am indeed.
Contact:
AIM: bestmysterious
Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
whitticus
IC Information:
Name:
Preincarnation: Wheatley (Formal Designation: "Aperture Science Intelligence Dampening Sphere", please don't call him that it's terrible and embarrassing)
Reincarnation: Pendleton Wheatley (please don't call him Pendleton it's terrible and embarrassing)
Canon and medium: Portal 2 | Video Game
Age:
Preincarnation: Old. Old as balls. Anywhere from a few decades to a century or two is probably a good ballpark. Programmed an adult, more or less.
Reincarnation: 32.
Preincarnation Species: Artificial intelligence/talking robot beachball
Preincarnation Appearance: Wheatley as he appears in Portal 2.
Any differences: yeah just a few
Appropriate words to describe his physicality would perhaps be "unimpressive", or "insubstantial". Standing at a height well under the acceptable average for a full-grown man, he sports a build that practically begs to be shoved in a locker, given a swirly or, if you happen to have an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device on you, both at once. He's a skinny little baby-faced pushover with terrible, terrible fashion sense.
Preincarnated History:
Aperture Science had a problem. A really big, self-aware, giant murderous robot kind of problem.
Rather than can the project in the interest of their lives, Aperture decided on another solution: supplementary programs called "Personality Spheres", or Cores. These smaller, simpler artificial intelligences embodied singular personality traits meant to alter GLaDOS' behavior and curb her homicidal tendencies, and the scientists worked to find an effective core or combination of cores that were suitably overpowering. Eventually, they had a brilliant idea.
Their brilliant idea was bad ideas. Lots of them. Give GLaDOS so many bad ideas that she would never so much as think "neurotoxin" or "murder" or any combination of the two ever again. They'd build a core to lessen her vast intellect and render her powerless. They'd build a core to make her stupid.
The culmination of this "Intelligence Dampening" project was Wheatley, a triumph of artificial stupidity and the most perfect idiot ever built. It's never stated what, exactly, happened when the two were plugged into each other, only that it was likely a mutually traumatizing experience that ultimately resulted in failure and Wheatley's deactivation.
Eventually, those meddling scientists got their comeuppance in the form of death by the very chemical agent they readily gave to a homicidal computer (oops). The ones that lived fixed GLaDOS with a Morality Core, a "conscience" that successfully discouraged her from gassing everyone--but did nothing to prevent her from keeping the facility on lockdown and indirectly killing the survivors on the portal device testing tracks.
And that's exactly what she did, until one day, when Portal happened. A human test subject killed GLaDOS and everything blew up in the process.
The reserve power kicked in, re-activating many of the defunct cores, our intrepid Intelligence Dampener included. Having repressed his time with GLaDOS, Wheatley set off to bumble about on a management rail, bouncing from job to job to job. More often than not, his exploits resulted in property damage--even the growing robot hierarchy didn't want to deal with him. Finally, after being denied a position in manufacturing, he ended up with "the worst possible job": looking after the ten thousand cryosleeping test subjects in Long-Term Relaxation.
In the years that followed, the facility entered a state of decay, relying solely on reserve power to maintain the reactor core and other vitals. Without GLaDOS to oversee the necessary functions of the Enrichment Center, nature quickly overran the sterile halls, turning the facility into a jungle.
It was sort of worrying.
After an undisclosed amount of time (probably decades, maybe a century or so), the reserve power grid failed, graduating the state of the place from "sort of worrying" to "very worrying indeed". No reserve power meant that the life support of the test subjects in Long-Term Relaxation ceased to function. Comatose humans were dying left and right, and the facility's nuclear core was melting down. He was out. He was so out. The only problem with a great escape was how he was going to accomplish it.
Luckily, not all of the test subjects were dead (yet), so Wheatley started smacking into doors, trying to find a human to help him leave the facility. The lady (Chell) he dragged from Long-Term Relaxation, though apparently mute, proved to be very valuable, especially where the portal gun was concerned. Things were going super well until he rebooted the facility's main power by accident. GLaDOS returned to life and, after revealing that this human compatriot had MURDERED HER all that time ago (what a twist!), crushed Wheatley with a mechanical claw.
Luckily, a bird pecking at the deactivated core accidentally initiated a reboot, and he was able to get himself back on his overhead transport rails. GLaDOS had halted the reactor core meltdown, but the escape was still on. The right moment came soon enough, and he busted Chell out of testing and led her to manufacturing, where they sabotaged the heck out of everything, including the neurotoxin generator. With these advantages, they confronted GLaDOS in the central AI chamber, where it was revealed that she was corrupt enough to initiate a core transfer--an exchange of AIs. Chell was quick to switch the two constructs, putting Wheatley in charge of the entire facility.
The switch proved to be a Very Bad Idea. He liked being in charge of everything. He liked it a lot. He liked it enough to halt the escape elevator.
Suspicious of Chell, already mad with power, and deciding it was high time he took action, Wheatley installed GLaDOS into a potato battery only to completely lose it when she instigated him, revealing his long-repressed true purpose. His very mature and totally rational response was to smash the elevator--Chell, POTaTOS and all--into the depths of the facility.
Okay, so he hadn't meant for that to happen. But FINE. That was FINE. He didn't need Chell anyway.
But he did, because as he soon found out, the control chassis had one very strong directive, an Itch that he could not ignore no matter what. He needed to test. A lot. All the time. Forever.
So while Chell and GLaDOS bummed around in Old Aperture, becoming best potatofriends, Wheatley renamed the facility after himself, and set about his great and glorious rule, with walking turret-cubes as test subjects. This was the opposite of successful, but he had to do it, because TESTING felt really good, thanks to the control body's built-in euphoric response to putting cubes on buttons.
Eventually, Chell and GLaDOS returned. PERFECT. He set them both to testing, hoping to get the euphoria he wanted faster. What he did not plan for, however, was the gradual diminishing of the response--he was building a resistance and did not understand why. Meanwhile, his neglect of the facility's vital functions was melting down the reactor core all over again. FRUSTRATING. When Chell momentarily escaped from the testing track, Wheatley took the opportunity to search around for other, better test subjects, but all the humans were still dead. Damn.
What he did find, however, were two robots! Built for testing! And with that, he realized he did not need Chell anymore, so he tried to kill her.
His increasingly-ridiculous death traps were unsuccessful across the board. Chell closed in on his lair and he, determined not to make the same mistakes as GLaDOS, made a whole bunch of new ones instead, allowing Chell access via portal to three corrupted cores which, when attached to the chassis, corrupted Wheatley in turn, enough to force a core transfer intended to put GLaDOS in her proper place.
It would have worked, too, if he hadn't booby-trapped the place, incapacitating his opponent. With the clock ticking down to reactor core explosion, the ceiling caved in and Chell fired a portal at the exposed moon. Turns out, moon rocks are just about the best portal conductor there is. The sudden difference in pressure sucked the whole crew into the vacuum, and GLaDOS, now back in control, decided enough was enough, punched Wheatley into space and dragged Chell back through the portal, deactivating it behind her.
THE FACILITY WAS SAVED.
...And Wheatley was left floating in orbit around the moon, with only his guilt and the Space Core to keep him company. Which sucked a lot for him. If he could, he would say he was sorry.
References: Portal 2 | Wheatley @ Half-Life/Portal Wiki
Reincarnated History:
The entire existence of Pendleton Wheatley is sort of a thirty two-year exercise in extreme mediocrity.
His is the story of a completely unremarkable only child of completely unremarkable parents growing up in a completely unremarkable town in southwest Great Britain. Most people make their way through childhood and adolescence. Wheatley muddled, and staggered, and maybe set a few things on fire, but who's counting? Truthfully, he was something of a lonely kid, his desperation for approval, hyper-anxious personality and general neediness a huge turn off for, you know, potential friends.
So he did as some lonely children do, and cultivated dual interests in science and technology. Somewhere along the way he decided he had a penchant for computers, and started teaching himself the basics of programming. Whether or not this was an actual penchant was (and still is) debatable, but at some point in his teenage years, Wheatley declared that his natural "skills" (????) were destined for greater things than complete unremarkability. When it was time to pursue higher education, he packed his bags and went stateside.
He muddled his way through Generic American East Coast State University, too, though he did pick up something of a reputation among fellow computer science majors for sweeping, deceptively competent strings of code that looked amazing at first glance. Classmates and professors alike were astounded by his seemingly natural ability to produce the most backwards, roundabout, ridiculous-yet-functional-against-all-odds programming that no one could possibly hope to duplicate. Truly it was the work of a mad genius--either that, or no one wanted to admit they didn't understand it. Student visas turned into working visas. Working visas turned into a green card. Hooray!
Unfortunately, Wheatley's so-insane-it-had-to-be-good programming style was only cute for as long as it could be passed off as "innovative, out-of-the-box thinking". Soon enough, he arrived in the real world and his projects were no longer inconsequential. Supervisors started picking apart what they thought was organized chaos to find that it was just plain old chaos, and although Wheatley could produce great idea after possibly crazy great idea, said ideas seemed to suffer from disastrous implementation across the board.
That was how Wheatley got fired.
Getting fired sort of became something of a constant for him, not just in tech firms, but in interim, get-the-bills-paid stuff too, and Wheatley spent much of his twenties bouncing from job to job, growing increasingly bitter as employers continually FAILED TO RECOGNIZE HIS TALENT. Truly, he was a misunderstood genius that no one could appreciate, but he'd never been the overtly aggressive sort, so he just kind of shut up and took it.
This had the ultimate result of Wheatley swallowing his dissatisfaction and learning to fly under the radar. It proved to be the secret for success--or rather, the secret for extreme mediocrity. He didn't have to worry about getting fired if he just put a lid on the BRILLIANT IDEAS and did as he was told, though it did make things terribly unsatisfying.
Eventually he was taken on as a programmer by a tech firm called Prometheus*. Wheatley moved to Locke City to get his code monkey on, and toiled away in cubicle land for a few years, trying not to be too sad about yet another job where his GENIUS WENT IGNORED. Opportunities for advancement presented themselves...and were promptly given to more capable co-workers, mostly leaving him with banal tasks that nobody else wanted to do. Excitement for a new start and chance to prove himself slowly dwindled as he was shuffled from task to task, being his needy, annoying, generally unlikeable self and ensuring that most of his co-workers did everything they could to keep him off their projects.
Which was terrible, as far as he was concerned, because he had so many good ideas. He just needed his chance.
THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED WHEN HE GOT HIS INVITATION TO THE SECRET NUMBER CLUB
*I have permission fromcarolinesays to have Wheatley work for Prometheus, which means he certainly knows of the mildly intimidating new CEO, for better or for worse.
First Echo:
Sometime in the second week of September, a workplace squabble (he was no stranger to those) escalated into a workplace shouting match--though Wheatley had certainly been called names that implied a lack of intelligence before, the word "moron", snapped at him with such an extreme degree of disgust and contempt triggered a very similar memory of being called that very insult.
The memory itself was almost entirely devoid of details beyond the robotic, vaguely feminine voice--just the knowledge that someone, somewhere, had called him this before and it was the perhaps the angriest he'd ever been in his entire life.
In a stunning display of explosive temper, he screamed down his co-worker, kicked a trash can, and stomped back to his cubicle. And then there was a string of numbers in his head and that was SUPER WEIRD???
Having been given this memory, Wheatley does not react very well to being called the m-word, just don't do it, shhhh.
Preincarnation Personality:
Wheatley is a little high-strung.
Okay, a lot high-strung. He's nervous, twitchy, easily excitable, and a motormouth to boot, talking almost constantly as if frightened of what might happen should there be complete silence. You know That Guy who never shuts up, no matter what, even in situations where one really should shut up? Wheatley's That Guy.
Bumbling, tactless, absent-minded, anxious and completely lacking in attention span, he has a penchant for rambling and strange anecdotes. He wears his emotions on his sleeves, and doesn't feel things in halves--if he is enthusiastic about something, he is very enthusiastic. If he is afraid, he is very afraid. If he panics, he really panics, fixating on the worst possible thing that could happen…and then promptly imagining something even worse. Though he's generally congenial and one might not immediately pinpoint him as an idiot (his vocabulary is rather substantial, after all), it's quite clear that he's incredibly eccentric, possibly crazy, and far from the sharpest knife in the drawer.
GLaDOS, perhaps, puts it best: Wheatley "is not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived".
This is only mostly true.
He's designed to generate awful ideas, a quality further exacerbated by a programmed inability to predict or plan for the often disastrous results of his own actions. This does not mean he can't have good ideas--in fact, he does have them. The problem lies in his terrible, overzealous execution and fervent belief that absolutely nothing is ever his fault. He's gullible, slightly vapid, lacks regard for consequence, and would much rather ignore things he doesn't understand than try to understand them. It's the combination of these factors that makes him a walking calamity. He is a perfect storm.
In fact, Wheatley is largely defined by a crippling inferiority complex and a burning desire to be taken seriously. Plagued by the nagging feeling that he might not be as smart as he thinks, he overcompensates, trying very hard to appear as though he knows what he's doing. When that doesn't work, he seems content to exist in delusion and blissful ignorance, "manually overriding" walls and doors by slamming into them, and "hacking" computers by engaging them in conversation. However, he's more self-aware than he lets on, as he seems to have been built just smart enough to have a massive complex about being stupid.
Despite his outward amiability, he is completely lacking in morals. He has little concept of empathy, no regard for human life, and, in fact, harbors anti-human sentiments. Even as he presumably develops a friendship (albeit an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" kind of friendship), Wheatley is selfish, self-centered and not above throwing someone under the bus if it means he gets to see another day. Above all else, he is a coward concerned with his own survival and underneath his quirky brand of geniality is a robot who is very embittered and unhappy with his lot in (artificial) life.
Once plugged into GLaDOS' mainframe, his negative qualities are exaggerated tenfold, revealing an uncontrollable temper and a pretty nasty mean streak. Given any kind of authority, Wheatley quickly takes the opportunity to abuse it, compensating for his previous useless existence by doing whatever he wants, however he wants, flying into a rage any time his intelligence or competence comes into question. After spending so long as "tiny little Wheatley", insignificant, inept and ignored, he goes insane with power the instant he gets it, proving to be unstable and full of BURNING VENGEANCE.
While it is unclear how much of this villainous episode is thanks to the mainframe, and how much is an amplification of Wheatley's pre-existing issues, his descent into homicidal robot psychosis is, in part, thanks to his own lack of self-control. Simply put, he does not have the processing capacity to maintain the Enrichment Center, and is quickly enslaved by "the Itch", a euphoric response to testing built into GLaDOS' body. As he builds a resistance to the response and is further consumed by the need to test, he becomes increasingly deluded, frustrated, paranoid, and single-mindedly devoted to murder, lapsing into hysterics when things take a turn for the worse. Through this, he proves incapable of understanding that he is the problem.
When removed from the chassis, Wheatley shows that he is capable of feeling remorse, though hindsight is, after all, twenty-twenty and it's very easy to be sorry when you're stranded in space. It's not that he isn't guilty. He just really, really liked being Robot God, and is a little angry about not being Robot God anymore. Given the opportunity, he would have made the same mistakes all over again.
Any differences:
Reincarnated Wheatley has one incredible advantage--he's human. Whereas a robot programmed to make terrible decisions is bound by cold hard code and therefore compelled in every way to make those terrible decisions over and over and over again, a human brain has elasticity the distinct ability to learn from mistakes and correct behavior. Though his decision making is still pretty "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks", he knows that his actions have consequences, and has learned over the course of his career that certain errors are far too disastrous to repeat.
He's also not a sociopath, wow! He's capable of feeling empathy, cares about what happens to other people, and actually has a set of morals, which is not generally a hallmark of Aperture Science. Play him some Sarah McLachlan over pictures of sad puppies, and he'll get misty just like the rest of us. Similarly, the only time his robo-self feels guilt is after he's been punished for his atrocious deeds. Though he still errs on the selfish side and pins blame on others like it's no one's business, he's able to feel and understand guilt in a more human way--less "kid caught in the cookie jar" and more actual adult remorse.
Wheatley is much more mentally stable (read: not batshit insane) and isn't ruled by the inferiority complex of his counterpart. The knowledge of being programmed expressly to be someone else's mental retardant little hard to swallow, but Pendleton doesn't need to worry about any of that! He is his own person, which has done wonders for both his self-esteem and his sanity (nobody wants a homicidal maniac in the workplace). Unfortunately, this may have gone a little too far in the other direction, giving him an over-inflated sense of self-importance--which isn't exactly unwarranted. Without the shackles of intelligence dampening protocols, he's actually pretty smart, though his true intelligence is often masked by his off-the-wall eccentricity, desperation for approval, and general tendency to jump headfirst into things.
Abilities:
Roleplay Sample - Third Person:
"Oi--"
Wheatley is half-kneeling, half-leaning on his office chair, his right knee jammed into the plush back, tipping it straight into the hard edge of his desk. It would be incredibly precarious if not for the fact that he's braced himself against the wall of the cubicle, hands gripping the top and providing just enough lift to let his head peek over.
So it's still precarious, just a little less so.
"Up here, yeah."
He's pretty sure his neighbor in the adjacent cubicle is meeting a deadline and doesn't want to be bothered, but it's not like this is going to take up huge amounts of time, and what are office buddies for if you can't borrow things from them?
"Just wondering, if you've--if you've got a minute. All out of staples, over here. Stapler itself's working fine, as far as I can tell, but decidedly--decidedly lacking in the actual staples. And I am at the stapling stage of my current project, so...sorry to bother you, by the way. Should've mentioned that first."
Wheatley casts a quick glance back into his own cubicle, as if to emphasize the fact that he is, in fact, working on something, and it involves a large stack of information pamphlets (about the new company energy policy or something, hell if he knows) that are printed and copied and collated, but not stapled.
"Could use paperclips, I guess, but not--not exactly what I'm going for, here. Much more effective, staples--"
What was sure to be a beautiful explanation of the superiority of staples over paperclips is cut short as his co-worker wordlessly shoves the box of office supplies in the air. He has to scoot his carefully-arranged peeking-over-cubicle-walls apparatus just a little bit closer, but after a moment of minor struggling and unattractive noises, Wheatley manages to grab the box.
"Right, thanks. Appreciate it, mate."
He doesn't receive more than a nod, which is fine--he's come to expect it by now, and honestly it's better than some kind of passive-aggressive snipe. "You just, uh. Keep on keeping on. With that...spreadsheet. Looks good, by the way! Go team!"
Wheatley adds the exchange to the "satisfactory, but could have been better" column in his ever-growing mental tally of co-worker conversations, and decides that maybe next time things will be a little more friendly if he knocks on the wall, first. Still, he has the staples, and it's the little things that count.
Roleplay Sample - Network:
[The video feed snaps on to reveal a great and glorious THUMB, which soon removes itself from the screen to reveal a great and glorious GINGER, who gets his coke-bottle hipster goggles a little too up close and personal with the phone camera before realizing that he's managed to turn it on.
When he does realize, he pulls back, all wide grins and terrible plaid flannel, image slightly smudged because of the thumbprint on the screen.]
Good news!
[He is also apparently very, very British.]
Did some preliminary diagnostics, ran a few tests. [Finger wiggles for emphasis!] Pretty sure that this is not, in fact, an incredibly sophisticated government surveillance mechanism.
I know, I know, that's what I thought too! But I'm probably...sixty to seventy percent certain we're all right on that front, which is good, because for a while there I was thinking this was an obvious government thing to do. You know, set up some kind of--of secret diary forum, or something, give us secret access codes to make us feel important, then mine all our secret diary posts for their...secret...government...things.
I mean--ha, it's like, uh. You know the little blocks with the black and white squares--quick response codes, by the way, if you were wondering--with...fewer Qs and Rs and more numbers, instead. Straight into our brains? Somehow?
Pretty smart! Wish I'd thought of it.
[Wheatley laughs abruptly, first nervous, then genuinely uncomfortable until it dissolves and his lopsided grin vanishes entirely.]
Seriously though, who are you people?
Any Questions? Think I'm good!
Name: Whit
Are you over 15? I am indeed.
Contact:
AIM: bestmysterious
Plurk:
IC Information:
Name:
Preincarnation: Wheatley (Formal Designation: "Aperture Science Intelligence Dampening Sphere", please don't call him that it's terrible and embarrassing)
Reincarnation: Pendleton Wheatley (please don't call him Pendleton it's terrible and embarrassing)
Canon and medium: Portal 2 | Video Game
Age:
Preincarnation: Old. Old as balls. Anywhere from a few decades to a century or two is probably a good ballpark. Programmed an adult, more or less.
Reincarnation: 32.
Preincarnation Species: Artificial intelligence/talking robot beachball
Preincarnation Appearance: Wheatley as he appears in Portal 2.
Any differences: yeah just a few
Appropriate words to describe his physicality would perhaps be "unimpressive", or "insubstantial". Standing at a height well under the acceptable average for a full-grown man, he sports a build that practically begs to be shoved in a locker, given a swirly or, if you happen to have an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device on you, both at once. He's a skinny little baby-faced pushover with terrible, terrible fashion sense.
Preincarnated History:
Aperture Science had a problem. A really big, self-aware, giant murderous robot kind of problem.
Rather than can the project in the interest of their lives, Aperture decided on another solution: supplementary programs called "Personality Spheres", or Cores. These smaller, simpler artificial intelligences embodied singular personality traits meant to alter GLaDOS' behavior and curb her homicidal tendencies, and the scientists worked to find an effective core or combination of cores that were suitably overpowering. Eventually, they had a brilliant idea.
Their brilliant idea was bad ideas. Lots of them. Give GLaDOS so many bad ideas that she would never so much as think "neurotoxin" or "murder" or any combination of the two ever again. They'd build a core to lessen her vast intellect and render her powerless. They'd build a core to make her stupid.
The culmination of this "Intelligence Dampening" project was Wheatley, a triumph of artificial stupidity and the most perfect idiot ever built. It's never stated what, exactly, happened when the two were plugged into each other, only that it was likely a mutually traumatizing experience that ultimately resulted in failure and Wheatley's deactivation.
Eventually, those meddling scientists got their comeuppance in the form of death by the very chemical agent they readily gave to a homicidal computer (oops). The ones that lived fixed GLaDOS with a Morality Core, a "conscience" that successfully discouraged her from gassing everyone--but did nothing to prevent her from keeping the facility on lockdown and indirectly killing the survivors on the portal device testing tracks.
And that's exactly what she did, until one day, when Portal happened. A human test subject killed GLaDOS and everything blew up in the process.
The reserve power kicked in, re-activating many of the defunct cores, our intrepid Intelligence Dampener included. Having repressed his time with GLaDOS, Wheatley set off to bumble about on a management rail, bouncing from job to job to job. More often than not, his exploits resulted in property damage--even the growing robot hierarchy didn't want to deal with him. Finally, after being denied a position in manufacturing, he ended up with "the worst possible job": looking after the ten thousand cryosleeping test subjects in Long-Term Relaxation.
In the years that followed, the facility entered a state of decay, relying solely on reserve power to maintain the reactor core and other vitals. Without GLaDOS to oversee the necessary functions of the Enrichment Center, nature quickly overran the sterile halls, turning the facility into a jungle.
It was sort of worrying.
After an undisclosed amount of time (probably decades, maybe a century or so), the reserve power grid failed, graduating the state of the place from "sort of worrying" to "very worrying indeed". No reserve power meant that the life support of the test subjects in Long-Term Relaxation ceased to function. Comatose humans were dying left and right, and the facility's nuclear core was melting down. He was out. He was so out. The only problem with a great escape was how he was going to accomplish it.
Luckily, not all of the test subjects were dead (yet), so Wheatley started smacking into doors, trying to find a human to help him leave the facility. The lady (Chell) he dragged from Long-Term Relaxation, though apparently mute, proved to be very valuable, especially where the portal gun was concerned. Things were going super well until he rebooted the facility's main power by accident. GLaDOS returned to life and, after revealing that this human compatriot had MURDERED HER all that time ago (what a twist!), crushed Wheatley with a mechanical claw.
Luckily, a bird pecking at the deactivated core accidentally initiated a reboot, and he was able to get himself back on his overhead transport rails. GLaDOS had halted the reactor core meltdown, but the escape was still on. The right moment came soon enough, and he busted Chell out of testing and led her to manufacturing, where they sabotaged the heck out of everything, including the neurotoxin generator. With these advantages, they confronted GLaDOS in the central AI chamber, where it was revealed that she was corrupt enough to initiate a core transfer--an exchange of AIs. Chell was quick to switch the two constructs, putting Wheatley in charge of the entire facility.
The switch proved to be a Very Bad Idea. He liked being in charge of everything. He liked it a lot. He liked it enough to halt the escape elevator.
Suspicious of Chell, already mad with power, and deciding it was high time he took action, Wheatley installed GLaDOS into a potato battery only to completely lose it when she instigated him, revealing his long-repressed true purpose. His very mature and totally rational response was to smash the elevator--Chell, POTaTOS and all--into the depths of the facility.
Okay, so he hadn't meant for that to happen. But FINE. That was FINE. He didn't need Chell anyway.
But he did, because as he soon found out, the control chassis had one very strong directive, an Itch that he could not ignore no matter what. He needed to test. A lot. All the time. Forever.
So while Chell and GLaDOS bummed around in Old Aperture, becoming best potatofriends, Wheatley renamed the facility after himself, and set about his great and glorious rule, with walking turret-cubes as test subjects. This was the opposite of successful, but he had to do it, because TESTING felt really good, thanks to the control body's built-in euphoric response to putting cubes on buttons.
Eventually, Chell and GLaDOS returned. PERFECT. He set them both to testing, hoping to get the euphoria he wanted faster. What he did not plan for, however, was the gradual diminishing of the response--he was building a resistance and did not understand why. Meanwhile, his neglect of the facility's vital functions was melting down the reactor core all over again. FRUSTRATING. When Chell momentarily escaped from the testing track, Wheatley took the opportunity to search around for other, better test subjects, but all the humans were still dead. Damn.
What he did find, however, were two robots! Built for testing! And with that, he realized he did not need Chell anymore, so he tried to kill her.
His increasingly-ridiculous death traps were unsuccessful across the board. Chell closed in on his lair and he, determined not to make the same mistakes as GLaDOS, made a whole bunch of new ones instead, allowing Chell access via portal to three corrupted cores which, when attached to the chassis, corrupted Wheatley in turn, enough to force a core transfer intended to put GLaDOS in her proper place.
It would have worked, too, if he hadn't booby-trapped the place, incapacitating his opponent. With the clock ticking down to reactor core explosion, the ceiling caved in and Chell fired a portal at the exposed moon. Turns out, moon rocks are just about the best portal conductor there is. The sudden difference in pressure sucked the whole crew into the vacuum, and GLaDOS, now back in control, decided enough was enough, punched Wheatley into space and dragged Chell back through the portal, deactivating it behind her.
THE FACILITY WAS SAVED.
...And Wheatley was left floating in orbit around the moon, with only his guilt and the Space Core to keep him company. Which sucked a lot for him. If he could, he would say he was sorry.
References: Portal 2 | Wheatley @ Half-Life/Portal Wiki
Reincarnated History:
The entire existence of Pendleton Wheatley is sort of a thirty two-year exercise in extreme mediocrity.
His is the story of a completely unremarkable only child of completely unremarkable parents growing up in a completely unremarkable town in southwest Great Britain. Most people make their way through childhood and adolescence. Wheatley muddled, and staggered, and maybe set a few things on fire, but who's counting? Truthfully, he was something of a lonely kid, his desperation for approval, hyper-anxious personality and general neediness a huge turn off for, you know, potential friends.
So he did as some lonely children do, and cultivated dual interests in science and technology. Somewhere along the way he decided he had a penchant for computers, and started teaching himself the basics of programming. Whether or not this was an actual penchant was (and still is) debatable, but at some point in his teenage years, Wheatley declared that his natural "skills" (????) were destined for greater things than complete unremarkability. When it was time to pursue higher education, he packed his bags and went stateside.
He muddled his way through Generic American East Coast State University, too, though he did pick up something of a reputation among fellow computer science majors for sweeping, deceptively competent strings of code that looked amazing at first glance. Classmates and professors alike were astounded by his seemingly natural ability to produce the most backwards, roundabout, ridiculous-yet-functional-against-all-odds programming that no one could possibly hope to duplicate. Truly it was the work of a mad genius--either that, or no one wanted to admit they didn't understand it. Student visas turned into working visas. Working visas turned into a green card. Hooray!
Unfortunately, Wheatley's so-insane-it-had-to-be-good programming style was only cute for as long as it could be passed off as "innovative, out-of-the-box thinking". Soon enough, he arrived in the real world and his projects were no longer inconsequential. Supervisors started picking apart what they thought was organized chaos to find that it was just plain old chaos, and although Wheatley could produce great idea after possibly crazy great idea, said ideas seemed to suffer from disastrous implementation across the board.
That was how Wheatley got fired.
Getting fired sort of became something of a constant for him, not just in tech firms, but in interim, get-the-bills-paid stuff too, and Wheatley spent much of his twenties bouncing from job to job, growing increasingly bitter as employers continually FAILED TO RECOGNIZE HIS TALENT. Truly, he was a misunderstood genius that no one could appreciate, but he'd never been the overtly aggressive sort, so he just kind of shut up and took it.
This had the ultimate result of Wheatley swallowing his dissatisfaction and learning to fly under the radar. It proved to be the secret for success--or rather, the secret for extreme mediocrity. He didn't have to worry about getting fired if he just put a lid on the BRILLIANT IDEAS and did as he was told, though it did make things terribly unsatisfying.
Eventually he was taken on as a programmer by a tech firm called Prometheus*. Wheatley moved to Locke City to get his code monkey on, and toiled away in cubicle land for a few years, trying not to be too sad about yet another job where his GENIUS WENT IGNORED. Opportunities for advancement presented themselves...and were promptly given to more capable co-workers, mostly leaving him with banal tasks that nobody else wanted to do. Excitement for a new start and chance to prove himself slowly dwindled as he was shuffled from task to task, being his needy, annoying, generally unlikeable self and ensuring that most of his co-workers did everything they could to keep him off their projects.
Which was terrible, as far as he was concerned, because he had so many good ideas. He just needed his chance.
THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED WHEN HE GOT HIS INVITATION TO THE SECRET NUMBER CLUB
*I have permission from
carolinesays to have Wheatley work for Prometheus, which means he certainly knows of the mildly intimidating new CEO, for better or for worse.First Echo:
Sometime in the second week of September, a workplace squabble (he was no stranger to those) escalated into a workplace shouting match--though Wheatley had certainly been called names that implied a lack of intelligence before, the word "moron", snapped at him with such an extreme degree of disgust and contempt triggered a very similar memory of being called that very insult.
The memory itself was almost entirely devoid of details beyond the robotic, vaguely feminine voice--just the knowledge that someone, somewhere, had called him this before and it was the perhaps the angriest he'd ever been in his entire life.
In a stunning display of explosive temper, he screamed down his co-worker, kicked a trash can, and stomped back to his cubicle. And then there was a string of numbers in his head and that was SUPER WEIRD???
Having been given this memory, Wheatley does not react very well to being called the m-word, just don't do it, shhhh.
Preincarnation Personality:
Wheatley is a little high-strung.
Okay, a lot high-strung. He's nervous, twitchy, easily excitable, and a motormouth to boot, talking almost constantly as if frightened of what might happen should there be complete silence. You know That Guy who never shuts up, no matter what, even in situations where one really should shut up? Wheatley's That Guy.
Bumbling, tactless, absent-minded, anxious and completely lacking in attention span, he has a penchant for rambling and strange anecdotes. He wears his emotions on his sleeves, and doesn't feel things in halves--if he is enthusiastic about something, he is very enthusiastic. If he is afraid, he is very afraid. If he panics, he really panics, fixating on the worst possible thing that could happen…and then promptly imagining something even worse. Though he's generally congenial and one might not immediately pinpoint him as an idiot (his vocabulary is rather substantial, after all), it's quite clear that he's incredibly eccentric, possibly crazy, and far from the sharpest knife in the drawer.
GLaDOS, perhaps, puts it best: Wheatley "is not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived".
This is only mostly true.
He's designed to generate awful ideas, a quality further exacerbated by a programmed inability to predict or plan for the often disastrous results of his own actions. This does not mean he can't have good ideas--in fact, he does have them. The problem lies in his terrible, overzealous execution and fervent belief that absolutely nothing is ever his fault. He's gullible, slightly vapid, lacks regard for consequence, and would much rather ignore things he doesn't understand than try to understand them. It's the combination of these factors that makes him a walking calamity. He is a perfect storm.
In fact, Wheatley is largely defined by a crippling inferiority complex and a burning desire to be taken seriously. Plagued by the nagging feeling that he might not be as smart as he thinks, he overcompensates, trying very hard to appear as though he knows what he's doing. When that doesn't work, he seems content to exist in delusion and blissful ignorance, "manually overriding" walls and doors by slamming into them, and "hacking" computers by engaging them in conversation. However, he's more self-aware than he lets on, as he seems to have been built just smart enough to have a massive complex about being stupid.
Despite his outward amiability, he is completely lacking in morals. He has little concept of empathy, no regard for human life, and, in fact, harbors anti-human sentiments. Even as he presumably develops a friendship (albeit an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" kind of friendship), Wheatley is selfish, self-centered and not above throwing someone under the bus if it means he gets to see another day. Above all else, he is a coward concerned with his own survival and underneath his quirky brand of geniality is a robot who is very embittered and unhappy with his lot in (artificial) life.
Once plugged into GLaDOS' mainframe, his negative qualities are exaggerated tenfold, revealing an uncontrollable temper and a pretty nasty mean streak. Given any kind of authority, Wheatley quickly takes the opportunity to abuse it, compensating for his previous useless existence by doing whatever he wants, however he wants, flying into a rage any time his intelligence or competence comes into question. After spending so long as "tiny little Wheatley", insignificant, inept and ignored, he goes insane with power the instant he gets it, proving to be unstable and full of BURNING VENGEANCE.
While it is unclear how much of this villainous episode is thanks to the mainframe, and how much is an amplification of Wheatley's pre-existing issues, his descent into homicidal robot psychosis is, in part, thanks to his own lack of self-control. Simply put, he does not have the processing capacity to maintain the Enrichment Center, and is quickly enslaved by "the Itch", a euphoric response to testing built into GLaDOS' body. As he builds a resistance to the response and is further consumed by the need to test, he becomes increasingly deluded, frustrated, paranoid, and single-mindedly devoted to murder, lapsing into hysterics when things take a turn for the worse. Through this, he proves incapable of understanding that he is the problem.
When removed from the chassis, Wheatley shows that he is capable of feeling remorse, though hindsight is, after all, twenty-twenty and it's very easy to be sorry when you're stranded in space. It's not that he isn't guilty. He just really, really liked being Robot God, and is a little angry about not being Robot God anymore. Given the opportunity, he would have made the same mistakes all over again.
Any differences:
Reincarnated Wheatley has one incredible advantage--he's human. Whereas a robot programmed to make terrible decisions is bound by cold hard code and therefore compelled in every way to make those terrible decisions over and over and over again, a human brain has elasticity the distinct ability to learn from mistakes and correct behavior. Though his decision making is still pretty "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks", he knows that his actions have consequences, and has learned over the course of his career that certain errors are far too disastrous to repeat.
He's also not a sociopath, wow! He's capable of feeling empathy, cares about what happens to other people, and actually has a set of morals, which is not generally a hallmark of Aperture Science. Play him some Sarah McLachlan over pictures of sad puppies, and he'll get misty just like the rest of us. Similarly, the only time his robo-self feels guilt is after he's been punished for his atrocious deeds. Though he still errs on the selfish side and pins blame on others like it's no one's business, he's able to feel and understand guilt in a more human way--less "kid caught in the cookie jar" and more actual adult remorse.
Wheatley is much more mentally stable (read: not batshit insane) and isn't ruled by the inferiority complex of his counterpart. The knowledge of being programmed expressly to be someone else's mental retardant little hard to swallow, but Pendleton doesn't need to worry about any of that! He is his own person, which has done wonders for both his self-esteem and his sanity (nobody wants a homicidal maniac in the workplace). Unfortunately, this may have gone a little too far in the other direction, giving him an over-inflated sense of self-importance--which isn't exactly unwarranted. Without the shackles of intelligence dampening protocols, he's actually pretty smart, though his true intelligence is often masked by his off-the-wall eccentricity, desperation for approval, and general tendency to jump headfirst into things.
Abilities:
◎ The astounding power of the really, really bad idea: he is literally hardwired to endlessly generate stupid things and make the worst possible choice in any given situation.
◎ This does, however, involve a bit of a loophole. Wheatley can be extremely cunning in certain situations simply because it would be inadvisable for him to succeed in his endeavors. For example: ignoring the warnings about that reactor core is a bad idea, so his programming allows him to be very good at doing everything but fixing the reactor core, i.e. setting up elaborate death traps, booby trapping his lair, and coming closer to killing Chell than GLaDOS ever did.
◎ As a core, he possesses the ability to interface with computer systems by plugging into them. Once connected, he is capable of simple manipulation of panels or lifts. The degree of control he gains is determined by the system itself--if he's plugged into the controls for an elevator, he is only able to move the elevator. Unplugged from his overhead track, he's limbless and incapable of independent movement, which kind of sucks a little bit.
◎ Did you know that all Aperture Science Personality Constructs can survive temperatures of up to 400 degrees Kelvin and will remain functional in apocalyptic, low power environments of as few as 1.1 volts, which is the exact amount of electricity generated by a potato battery? Now you do!
◎ He has a built-in flashlight!!
◎ Wheatley is IMMUNE TO PARADOX THAT WOULD FRY OTHER AI SYSTEMS actually though this is less of an ability and more of a shining testament to his sheer lack of intelligence.
◎ He fancies himself an expert hacker. He's not.
Roleplay Sample - Third Person:
"Oi--"
Wheatley is half-kneeling, half-leaning on his office chair, his right knee jammed into the plush back, tipping it straight into the hard edge of his desk. It would be incredibly precarious if not for the fact that he's braced himself against the wall of the cubicle, hands gripping the top and providing just enough lift to let his head peek over.
So it's still precarious, just a little less so.
"Up here, yeah."
He's pretty sure his neighbor in the adjacent cubicle is meeting a deadline and doesn't want to be bothered, but it's not like this is going to take up huge amounts of time, and what are office buddies for if you can't borrow things from them?
"Just wondering, if you've--if you've got a minute. All out of staples, over here. Stapler itself's working fine, as far as I can tell, but decidedly--decidedly lacking in the actual staples. And I am at the stapling stage of my current project, so...sorry to bother you, by the way. Should've mentioned that first."
Wheatley casts a quick glance back into his own cubicle, as if to emphasize the fact that he is, in fact, working on something, and it involves a large stack of information pamphlets (about the new company energy policy or something, hell if he knows) that are printed and copied and collated, but not stapled.
"Could use paperclips, I guess, but not--not exactly what I'm going for, here. Much more effective, staples--"
What was sure to be a beautiful explanation of the superiority of staples over paperclips is cut short as his co-worker wordlessly shoves the box of office supplies in the air. He has to scoot his carefully-arranged peeking-over-cubicle-walls apparatus just a little bit closer, but after a moment of minor struggling and unattractive noises, Wheatley manages to grab the box.
"Right, thanks. Appreciate it, mate."
He doesn't receive more than a nod, which is fine--he's come to expect it by now, and honestly it's better than some kind of passive-aggressive snipe. "You just, uh. Keep on keeping on. With that...spreadsheet. Looks good, by the way! Go team!"
Wheatley adds the exchange to the "satisfactory, but could have been better" column in his ever-growing mental tally of co-worker conversations, and decides that maybe next time things will be a little more friendly if he knocks on the wall, first. Still, he has the staples, and it's the little things that count.
Roleplay Sample - Network:
[The video feed snaps on to reveal a great and glorious THUMB, which soon removes itself from the screen to reveal a great and glorious GINGER, who gets his coke-bottle hipster goggles a little too up close and personal with the phone camera before realizing that he's managed to turn it on.
When he does realize, he pulls back, all wide grins and terrible plaid flannel, image slightly smudged because of the thumbprint on the screen.]
Good news!
[He is also apparently very, very British.]
Did some preliminary diagnostics, ran a few tests. [Finger wiggles for emphasis!] Pretty sure that this is not, in fact, an incredibly sophisticated government surveillance mechanism.
I know, I know, that's what I thought too! But I'm probably...sixty to seventy percent certain we're all right on that front, which is good, because for a while there I was thinking this was an obvious government thing to do. You know, set up some kind of--of secret diary forum, or something, give us secret access codes to make us feel important, then mine all our secret diary posts for their...secret...government...things.
I mean--ha, it's like, uh. You know the little blocks with the black and white squares--quick response codes, by the way, if you were wondering--with...fewer Qs and Rs and more numbers, instead. Straight into our brains? Somehow?
Pretty smart! Wish I'd thought of it.
[Wheatley laughs abruptly, first nervous, then genuinely uncomfortable until it dissolves and his lopsided grin vanishes entirely.]
Seriously though, who are you people?
Any Questions? Think I'm good!