Portal 2 Grammar Underlying

7/28/2019 Portal 2 Grammar Underlying

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1 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYING

"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 perspectiveof 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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3 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGUsing 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:

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

Illustration 1: Lab Rat, Page 13


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4 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGstandard-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 post-

apocalyptic 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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5 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGthat 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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6 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGhere). 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 toWork 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 self-

aware 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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7 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYING 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 AlyxVance. 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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8 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYING 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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9 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGan 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 sameyear) 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'sstories, 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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11 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGher 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 withhigh 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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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 intendedto 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 toneurotoxin 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

Illustration 5: Rogue AI extension

Illustration 4: 219 associated with Chell's file


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13 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYING 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 puttingher 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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14 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGChell 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 andrededicated 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 life-

extending 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 tostore 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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Illustration 7: Cryo tank, Portal 2 Illustration 8: Cryo tank, Half-Life 2 Beta


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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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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

Illustration 9: Rattmann exclaims that it's the right file


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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 becomesunhinged, 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

Illustration 10: Dioramas illustrating Doug Rattmann's timeline of Bring Your Daughter toWork Day, as well as Chell's destruction of GLaDOS.


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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

Illustration 11: Compare these shots; someone has been living here.


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21 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGrampant 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 moreoptions 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 Half-

Life 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 inGLaDOS' 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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23 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGConstruct", 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 areother 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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24 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGchamber, 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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26 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGdeath 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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27 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGIt 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 thoughGLaDOS 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 TestSubject #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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29 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGmay 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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30 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGsince 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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31 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGSuch 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 GLaDOSincursions, 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 anti-

GLaDOS 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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32 - GRAMMAR UNDERLYINGRattmann 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.

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