Synecdoche (Portal 2)
They call her the Borealis, an icebreaker ship, a hull as solid as a bomb shelter, a nose that cuts through sea ice like an axe chops through wood, cleaving frosted chunks in two. Gone now. A dark memory. Legend of the scientific intelligentsia. The nerds. Only an underground dry dock remains, empty, so large a single voice can echo for minutes, a sound like the dead murmuring. Way down there, in that tomb-like hollow, a round, orange life preserver can be found at the end of a grated catwalk, resting against the granular concrete wall.
Like a goodbye note left taped to the fridge. Or a photograph on the bureau of a friend that died years ago. Synecdoche. If there were still storytellers here, they might say something about temporal and spatial displacement. The complete breakdown of quantum physics. Only rumors, understand? Hearsay around the Black Mesa water coolers or in the ruins of City 17 over trashcan fires. Here’s another one: a gun that can rip holes in reality itself, so that a wall can be torn like a magazine page, leaving a blue burning corona in its place, a portal to wherever its sister door, an orange wreath of corporeal and temporal distortion, is pasted. Only rumors, understand?