The Disposable Enquiry [Round 1: Kyyhkynen]

Username: AgentComplementaryOrange
Theme Words: Aperture + Prisoner (=_=)
Name: Coriander
Gender: Male
Race: Aperture Science Human Resources Personality Core
Color: #A4A5B5~
Description: Coriander is a personality core, a rough sphere about the size and shape of a beach ball and comprised of worn white metal plates. At one pole is the standard Aperture Science Data and Power Connector, and at the other is Coriander’s eye, set on three-dimensional swiveling joints. Around the eye are two handles for grasping and carrying Coriander about. Coriander’s pupil shows a pixilated aperture, which rotates and contracts according to his state of mind.
…His state of mind is frankly quite unstable.
After the death of most human resources at the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center, Coriander went insane and now hallucinates Aperture Science staff at times of stress. When he is lucid, however, Coriander is a lonely personality, wondering where his human resources went off to. He shows signs of being a schizophrenic and of being underneath all the insanity a genuinely pleasant and charming individual – an individual imprisoned inside his own corrupted-data mind.
Weapons and Abilities: Normally, Coriander can’t move. Since he’s a core and doesn’t have arms or legs. Luckily he has a small rocket launcher inside him somehow, which provides his only form of self-transportation. Equally luckily, he also has an unlimited supply of rockets manufactured from air (Aperture used the Aperture Science Air-Powered Rocket Manufacturing Device to test how long it takes to make a baked potato). Unluckily, launching yourself on the explosion of a rocket launcher firing backwards is not entirely…precise. And he could use it as a weapon too. Gee, who knew rocket launchers weren’t meant for propelling insane corrupt cores?
When he’s not being insane, he’s actually kind of a nice personality to talk to. Can’t be manager of human resources without being good with humans! Ironically (or maybe expectedly), he’s terrible with anyone who isn’t human. (When he’s being insane, try not to get caught by a rocket).
Biography: “Julia, if you would be so kind – I need to see Employee #33-1212-99 (Mr) Antas about his efficiency. Could you fetch him for me?”

“Sure thing, sir!”

“Thanks, Julia.”

Coriander sat – well, moved a little on the rail that extended low over the seat situated behind his beloved mahogany desk, and smiled to himself. Not that he had the ability to smile – he was, after all, an Aperture Science Personality Core, a robotic sphere the size of a beach ball, with a single blue aperture of an eye articulate inside his metallic shell. But his aperture-eye did a little twirl, and that meant the same thing, really.

He cast his gaze about the office, and noted its strange order of disarray, and the dust that seemed to coat every surface – and then he felt that feeling again. It was a feeling that always felt familiar, though he could never remember having encountered it before. It was a feeling that always felt sickening, like the hobnailed boots of a hard truth. It was the feeling of realization – realization that Julia would not be returning through the door, nor would Mr Antas need some mandatory testing cycles, nor had they been alive at any time in the last year.

A long time ago, he had been designed to oversee microassembly of Aperture Science Genetically Modified Paper Clips. But in true Aperture Science style, he was instead put to work in a human resources capacity – and he was good at it. He had gone around and he had made things efficient, he had made things work and he had sent test subjects for science…

But then she had come online.

The neurotoxin had made him irrelevant, and so Coriander wandered the corridors of the post-human Enrichment Center, without role – without purpose – without people…

Julia opened the door, leading in a young man in a green lab coat. “Mr. Antas, sir.”

Coriander shook himself from his reverie. “Thank you, Julia.” As she closed the door, he stared at Antas carefully. The young man raised his gaze, and two calm green eyes met his blue. “Please-” –he looked up the personnel file– “-Quentin, sit.”

“You don’t have to. I won’t either.”

He blinked at Antas’ vicious response – either this was some hallucination or memory, or an employee was actually being inconceivably insubordinate...

Eventually, he grew insane. Without faculty to administrate, he simply imagined the world with a dutiful staff of pencil-pushers, Aperture scientists, and fellow robots who occasionally approached him to ask why he was talking to thin air and sending out forms with dead people’s names on them. Once or twice he thought he talked to someone real, by dint of the fact that the dirty, untidy scientist ignored him instead of obediently processing the graffiti injunctions he handed out.

He hadn’t been sure what had happened to Employee #33-1212-99 (Mr) Quentin Antas after that. He had been dropped from the records later.

And soon after that everyone had been dropped from the records…

At about the same time her recalibration had finished and human testing resumed with a certain test subject, Coriander was shut away as a corrupt core, cut off from the mainframe and left to sit in the old office with the mahogany desk. And about the same time that a certain test subject returned from hibernation, Coriander suddenly vanished, leaving only a dusty office behind -