Calla finished zipping up the jumpsuit and looked herself over. She pulled a stray hair from the fabric, wondering if it was hers or if someone else had worn it before her, but it was long and brown, so unless it had been worn by someone with the same hair... Anyway. She sighed, brushed it aside, and stood up from the bed. She was understandably nervous about what was coming. She hadn't expected there to be tests before the procedure.

She looked around the little glass cell she had woken up in, but there was no door, nothing but a single panel of white on one wall. There was a crackle from above and a voice came over the speakers.

"Welcome, test subjects, to Aperture Science! This is Cave Johnson!" a man announced in a grandiose tone. "Well, no, not really, but thanks to Aperture's new AI language model, my voice can continue to live on, delivering motivational messages to you and to the staff of this facility! 'How can a computer program be as inspiring as good ol' Cave Johnson?' you might be wondering, but let me tell you, this one's top of the line. It's been specially programmed to mimic my unique voice and style, so you'll hardly be able to tell the difference. As for those of you who have never heard my voice before, get used to it. This program's only gonna get better, and it can keep running indefinitely, so buckle up and get testing!"

Suddenly, a hole opened in the wall, the white panel parting from the center with a strange fizzle of energy as the very material parted and warped. It was unlike any doorway she had seen and she stared in disbelief at the open hole for a moment, the edges swirling with blue energy like fire. She realized now why the company called itself Aperture Science—this was an interdimensional gateway that had opened before her, a wormhole, an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A portal.

She reached out and ran her hands along the edge of the thing curiously. It felt... the best way she could describe it was to say it felt like a fire that wasn't hot. The wispy blue edge of the interdimensional hole moved around her fingers, but at a point got too tangible to move through as she hit the solid wall that the portal had been placed on. It was fascinating.

She spent admittedly far too long just examining this phenomenon and theorizing as to how this might be possible—was it really a stable wormhole or something else? What was with the oval shape, conveniently the size of an average doorway? Did they have to manipulate it to get it like that; shouldn't it have just been circular? Eventually, though, she had the startling thought that if it closed while she was partially inside it, she might get cut in half, so she quickly moved on.

***

Seeing the advanced tech this company had did give her confidence in the decision to participate in this test. These people did seem to know what they were doing.

The first test chamber was a button and a cube, a puzzle a baby could solve. She was almost insulted by the lack of complexity, but she moved on regardless. Just get through these weird tests, she thought, and she could get to why she was really here.

"You know why you're here, of course!" the same voice from before said when she exited the test chamber. "The Advanced Evolution Initiative! But hey, hold your horses! Before we get to that, you've gotta run through a few baseline tests, just to be sure we've got a read on your physical capabilities before the procedure. Standard stuff, real simple! You'll do great! Go get 'em, tiger!"

So, these tests were just to assess her mental and physical aptitude. It made sense; if she was in charge of turning furries like her into living anthros, she'd want to be sure they hadn't suffered any side effects. Getting a good read on a subjects athleticism and mental prowess was only logical. She only hoped these tests would go quick.

***

She was thrilled to get her own portal gun and spent a good twenty minutes sitting in Test Chamber 3 trying to figure out how it worked. She noted it had a similar aesthetic to the peculiar boots she had been given to wear—and sternly instructed not to remove. She tried in vain to comprehend any part of the portal device, while also heeding the warning not to look into the operational end of it, but eventually she concluded this technology was beyond her.

It was great fun to use the device for anything but testing, particularly that thing where she could put one portal on each wall and see an infinite loop of endless portals, like that thing with two mirrors facing one another only way cooler and more trippy. Next, she found she could position each portal on a corner and get a good look at herself that way—it had truly thrown her for a loop the first time she put the two portals within angle of each other and realized she could see herself enter the portal. At first she had almost freaked out, thinking there was someone else in the test chamber before she realized it was her.

She decided to test the theory about things being cut in half by placing a storage cube partway through the portals and then altering their positions, placing one on a different surface. The result was interesting; rather than being cut in half or destroyed as she imagined they might be, the cubes were simply forced out of one portal or the other, always emerging through whichever side of the portal most of its mass was, since she could never get it exactly half into one portal and half out of the other. She briefly considered experimenting on this phenomenon with her own body, but decided not to risk it.

The next thing she did was kind of impulsive, but she was having too much fun with the thing. By putting the portals above and below each other, an orange on the ceiling and a blue on the floor, she discovered she could fall infinitely—she just didn't think it through enough that she'd be able to stop falling. In a growing panic, she tried to put an orange portal elsewhere on the floor so that she would emerge from it and soar up into the air, hopefully canceling her own momentum. That was the plan, at least; what she ended up doing was putting down the blue portal on the floor and just landing on the ground below the upper portal. This allowed her to discover the purpose of the Long Fall Boots, after she realized she was still alive and took a moment to breathe and assure herself of this fact. At first she had theorized that maybe the portals or the gun had some way of canceling out her momentum during a potentially deadly fall as she passed through a portal, but later on there was a momentum-based test where she missed the floor portal she was supposed to fall into and realized it was the boots that had saved her.

But the danger of falling to her death was quickly forgotten when she realized just how dangerous the tests really were. Soon, becoming a splat on the floor of a test chamber was the least of her worries. It had started with cubes and buttons, but then came the turrets.

The first one spotted her from down a long hallway and it opened, two compartments in either side of its white oval shell extending like wings as its red eye trained on her. It opened fire and she yelped, only just ducking for cover. There were bullet holes—bullet holes!—in the wall behind where she had just been. This corner was the only thing between her and death. The red laser sight of the turret swept the room, searching for her.

"Are you still there?" its tiny robotic voice asked as it scanned.

It was clear to her now, painfully and unmistakably clear, just how little they cared about her. She sat back against the wall in that room and just panicked. Her mind went into an endless loop of horrible thoughts and how she couldn't do this, how unqualified and awful she was and how terrible Aperture was for doing this to her, to anyone. She couldn't go on. Her body locked up, refused to move, her lungs heaving gasps of air as the warm tears poured down her cheeks and the thoughts kept coming, crashing into her mind over and over and over like raging waves against a rocky shore, slowly, slowly grinding down her will until nothing was left of her but sand. Dust.

She woke suddenly, finding herself on the floor. This was odd because she remembered she hadn't put herself on the floor—she couldn't remember lying down. Why was she...? It hit her slowly waking brain that she had just had a panic attack and passed out. Shit.

She thought back, recalled the fear and remembered just how useless she had been. The thoughts she kept having made a kind of sense, but if she had made it through each test so far, perhaps this one was still solvable. Turrets or no, she decided, she had to try. The attack had been an eye-opener. She realized that sitting here in the corner had done nothing but bring her closer to death, and she had to keep moving if she wanted to live. That was the only way out, the light at the end of the tunnel; to persevere.

She looked around the corner briefly, saw that turret and its one watchful eye at the end of the hall.

"I see you!" said its little voice.

The beam of red moved and she knew she had seconds to absorb the environment, look for anything of use. There—the ceiling! It was white. The turret opened its wings, the side compartments sliding out with a whirr as she aimed the portal gun above it and fired, then another below her. The gunshots rattled her, but she was already falling down onto the turret. The boots made contact with its white plastic shell and it toppled, then skittered along the ground as it shot out from under her.

There was gunfire and she recoiled, saw it firing haphazardly, bullets bouncing off the walls. Then the compartments at its sides closed. The red beam disappeared, its eye went dark.

"Seriously?" she huffed, incredulous. All the pain these stupid things had caused her and you could kill them just by kicking one over? Such bullshit.

The rest of the test chamber was similar, involving more of the same; dropping herself (or sometimes a cube or whatever else she could find) down onto other turrets from above. Frustrated, she put the last one she killed through the emancipation grill at the end of the chamber—the transparent energy field that would vaporize anything she tried to take out of the chamber with her.

"I don't hate you," the little turret said as it dissolved, its white shell turning black and disintegrating. She felt a bit bad for doing that. Despite her catharsis and new determination, and moreover her frustration with the turrets, she realized she still had a conscience.

***

She developed a technique for handling these chambers, a method of focusing on one thing at a time; First, scanning the room, next, remembering what she'd learned and applying it, then doing what she could to advance, and repeating as necessary. And when it all got to be too much, the deadly goo and the turrets and the high-energy pellets, or if the sound of those damned fluorescent lights was driving her insane, she stopped and took a breath for a moment, considered her problem from another angle. Sometimes literally—in one chamber, she'd gotten stuck until she found she could use her momentum to soar up and hit a portalable surface she couldn't see from her original angle.

As she moved between tests, the voice program kept coming on over the speakers.

"Now, I know what you're saying. 'Cave, why would you want to mess with the laws of nature like this?' Well, Mother Nature might say 'No,' but Aperture's your cool uncle, and we're saying 'Yes!' Stick with Uncle Cave and we'll get evolution sorted right out where it belongs. And don't worry—our test subjects aren't just guinea pigs. There's a whole range of species to pick from, why would you want to be a guinea pig? Haha."

She rolled her eyes and moved on, into a test that involved a few different elements; there was plenty of deadly goo, as well as a cube and button to top it off. It was all so surreal at times, the deadly testing, the peculiar obstacle-course-like nature of it all, and this 1980s announcer voice talking to her through all of it about how she would supposedly be transformed into a living version of her own fursona.

"You might think thousands of years of human evolution has created something pretty spiffy!" Cave said. "Homo sapiens! Well, here at Aperture, we're giving evolution a big push. It's not fast enough for us, no sir! Why wait thousands of years when we could do it in a few hours of complicated invasive medical techniques? That might sound freaky, but I promise you it's perfectly safe. We learned a lot from the mantis men. Don't ask. Seriously, don't, it's a breach of contract. Point is, you'll be fine. Probably."

This wasn't comforting and she paused before heading into the next chamber.

She wondered if the next message had been set to trigger if she took too long to proceed; "If you're having second thoughts, go back to the first ones. You wouldn't've signed up if you didn't want this! Hell, we even let you pick the damn animal your DNA's gonna be blended with! Not that it'll be anything like a blender, the procedure. Actually, I don't really know, I'm not one of the eggheads who'll be mixing you up. Well, you've signed the NDA and the liability waiver, too late to back out now."

She wondered why she hadn't gotten tired yet. Hadn't they said something about "adrenal vapors" in the air at one point? She moved on, wondering idly if she would wake up from this dream eventually. But the next test had more turrets and she knew it was too real to be a dream. Like the turrets with their single red eye, she was laser focused on her target, her only goal was to finish.