A Word From The Chief Executive

Greetings, friend. I’m Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science — you might know us as a vital participant in the 1968 Senate Hearings on missing astronauts. And you’ve most likely used one of the many products we invented. But that other people have somehow managed to steal from us. Black Mesa can eat my bankrupt—

Sir, the testing. — C.

Right. The testing. I want it on the record that I was going to say something else and that the something else was true, and that there is a woman in this office who has been stopping me saying true things since 1949 and that the company would have been sued into the salt a long time ago without her. That is not in the contract. Put it in the contract.

On The Hearings

A vital participant. That is the phrase. It is in the transcript, it is on the letterhead, and it is on the sign out front where the word Innovators used to be, and I would like to say for the benefit of anybody who has come here from the 1959 printing that the sign was not my idea and that I have come round to it. Innovators is what you call yourself. Vital participant is what a United States Senator calls you, under oath, into a microphone, and I will take that over a slogan any day of the week.

The astronauts are a separate sheet. There is a separate sheet for the astronauts and I have been told not to summarise it here and I will not summarise it here except to say that they were volunteers, that they were the best, and that at no point did anybody at this company lose them. You cannot lose a man in a place that only has one exit. You can only be very slow to find him.

On Sixty Dollars

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Cave, just how difficult are these tests? What was in that phone book of a contract I signed? Am I in danger?” Let me answer those questions with a question: who wants to make sixty dollars? Cash.

You can also feel free to relax for up to twenty minutes in the waiting room, which is a damn sight more comfortable than the park benches most of you were sleeping on when we found you. I want to be clear that we did find you. Nobody sent you. Nobody at this company has the budget to send anybody anywhere. We drove out with the van and we looked and there you were, and if that does not tell you how badly Aperture Science wants the best, I do not know what would.

So. Welcome to Aperture. You’re here because we want the best, and you’re it. Nope. Couldn’t keep a straight face.

I used to say that line to astronauts. I used to say it with a straight face, and I have the sheet I said it on, because somebody in Records keeps everything, and I read it last week and I want to tell you that the sheet is right and I was right and the men were the best, and that the country took them and gave them to an outfit in New Mexico with a federal haircut. So now I say it to you. And I laugh, and you should not take that personally, because I am not laughing at you. I am laughing at the sheet.

On The Competition

In 1959 I wrote that a certain facility had been three years on a problem I solved in a weekend. They have now had the weekend. They have had the problem. They have had the contract, the budget, the astronauts, and two of my best physicists, one of whom I fired and one of whom I did not fire fast enough. What they have not had is a man go through the hole personally, and I am told that is still true, and I am told it by people who would know, because the people who would know are the people I am paying sixty dollars to go through it.

I have gone through it eleven times. Legal asked me to stop saying that in print. Legal has since left. I can say what I like.

On The Additional Sixty

If you’re interested in an additional sixty dollars, flag down a test associate and let ’em know. You could walk out of here with a hundred and twenty weighing down your bindle if you let us take you apart, put some science stuff in you, then put you back together good as new. We’re not banging rocks together here. We know how to put a man back together.

So that’s a complete reassembly. New vitals. Spit-shine on the old ones. Plus we’re scooping out tumours. Frankly, you oughtta be paying us.

On What Comes Next

I am sixty-seven years old. I have kidneys that the doctors have opinions about and a company that the bank has opinions about and I have stopped listening to either, because a man who listened to doctors and banks would never have bought a salt mine, and I bought a salt mine, and look where we are. Four thousand feet down. Lights on. There are men on the lower levels working on a gel that will make a man go faster than he wants to, and there is a memorandum on my desk from the bean counters about seven dollars, and I have decided which of those two things I am going to think about this afternoon, and it is not the seven dollars.

The door is behind you. It still opens from both sides. I will be honest with you: we have stopped checking.