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The mantis people are the real victims in Aperture Desk JobWhat might that mantis society have become, were it not for your and Grady’s terrible schemes?
What might that mantis society have become, were it not for your and Grady’s terrible schemes?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Valve
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Valve
Aperture Desk Jobis full of unexplained details. Right at the start, as the camera pans down from the retrofuturist reception area to your lowly desk-based workstation, we see all manner of orange tubes, future Grady cores being trained to fool captcha image tests, a giant chicken, and what appears to be the origin point ofHalf-Life’s ammo boxes being constructed. But there’s also a pointed shot between the floorboards, showing us a pair of green praying mantises fumbling around over some electrical wiring and a rogue lightbulb.
Such civilised society these mantises once had… |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Valve
My working theory is thus. While the timeline of the creation of these mantis men isn’t completely clear, at least not in relation to you destroying their futuristic quantum energy society with the giant metal head of Cave Johnson himself at the end of Aperture Desk Job, it’s obvious that some singular mantis, somewhere, somehow, has had its DNA spliced with an unfortunate human being elsewhere in the Aperture Science Facility, creating what I can only imagine is a truly terrifying nightmare vision that is the aforementioned mantis men.
That Grady… what won’t he do? |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Valve
Listen, I know Half-Life’s headcrabstechnicallycome from Xen and all that, and that the general theory of their birth is that they’re spawned from those horrible fleshy sacks on legs known asGonarchs, but hear me out. IfBlack Mesascientists were regularly teleporting back and forth between Earth and Xen for their research, who’s to say that there wasn’t some evolutionary tampering going on somewhere, right? There’s also something quite mantis-like about the Gonarch if you ask me, if you squint from a distance of 100m, which only strengthens my theory further, if you ask me. Thus I am compelled to conclude that this scenario is entirely and feasibly possible. And YOU made it happen when you dropped Cave Johnson’s head through the ground, you monster.
But we’ll never know, because you dropped an enormous Cave Johnson head on them in your desperate scheme to get rich quick with your fragile porcelain toilet turrets. Honestly. Never trust your fate to Aperture’s dubious personality cores. They’ll lead you astray and change the course of history forever, and no one will be any better off because of it.
