Dear Alyx: A Letter from Gordon Freeman

Dear Alyx,

By the time you read this, I'll be gone.

The first thing I want to say is "Sorry". You're going to feel really alone now, given what happened to your dad, and I know that you'd rather have me with you. There's only one problem.

I'm trying to save the world. Let me be more specific. I'm trying to save MY world.

The rest of you have had 20 years to get used to this nightmare that you call living. In my timeframe, 4 weeks ago, the most I had to worry about was blowing up a dish in the Black Mesa microwave. I was supposed to be skiing in Vail this weekend, with the girl I'd been on-again, off-again for the past year. I had 2 pounds of Ethiopian coffee on order from my roasters in San Fran. I had library books to return.

That was a month ago for me. It may as well have never happened for you.

Alyx, you're cut from different cloth than me. You were born to be a survivor, a leader, a warrior. You nearly died half a day ago and you walk around with the same jacket on, which has your own blood on the places where the Hunter's spikes pinned you to the ground and cut up your insides. That's just what you do. You're amazing.

But, to me, you're 4. You have to understand that. If I think of you as 24, as real, then this whole thing is real. This whole fucking nightmare of a world, with the head crabs and the troops, is real.

Have you noticed that everything we encounter screams or moans? Even those things that the Combine have cut most of the humanity out of - they scream and scream and scream. When I close my eyes, if I manage to get any sleep, the stalkers loom out of the darkness, swing back their eye shields and scream in my face.

And you wonder why I never say anything. This is a nightmare. I don't have anything to say.

I can't save your world any more. I don't want to. I want the cats and dogs back. I want to be able to walk in the countryside without a shotgun and an armoured suit. I want to sleep again. I want my fucking coffee and my ski trip and my dumb movies and I want it back for everyone who's died along the way. Your mom, your dad, everyone.

You're needed here. If I'd told you what I was planning, you'd have come after me, but with Eli gone, they need you here. Magnusson is an ass but he can be guided. It'll be hard but I know you can do it. Kleiner will be on your side, just make sure that you slip that little cerebro-copulatory pet of his a dish of milk occasionally and he'll be fine.

Jesus, Milk. Can we even still get milk? Do you even know what coffee is anymore?

I've taken the details of the Borealis. I'm going after it. I've looked at the plans and it's a mobile portal platform, self-powered. There are two giant reactors in there like nothing I've ever seen before. If I had to guess, and I will, I sense the hand of that smarmy motherfucker, the G-Man, in those reactors. Like the crystal he gave us at Black Mesa. No wonder your dad wanted it destroyed.

"Prepare for Unforeseen Consequences." Yeah, right.

But I think Eli was missing the point. Yes, the Borealis is dangerous but the Borealis is special. What's most special about it is how old it is. It's just not old enough.

You get that, Alyx? I'm not old enough because I got held somewhere by the G-Man. But I think the Borealis isn't old enough because somewhere between the weird portal generator and the reactors, that thing can really move. Not just in three-space, but in four. Eli thought we'd just re-open the super portal. I don't think so. I think we can do much more than that.

I've done some calculations on the amount of power and focus required to move a portal in time, as well as space, and I've left them for Kleiner. Magnusson is going to want my head on a plate after I leave, but Kleiner should be able to confirm it. You'll see how much power I need if I'm going to make a jump backwards. Say, 20 years.

Which means that you may never read this because you will never have been here to read it and I will never have been here to write it. If I'm right, and I pray that I am, I can jam the Borealis back into the portal that we originally opened, bridging now and then and drawing power from both ends at the same time. But I'm going to need some help and that's where Kleiner comes in.

If I'm going to do this properly, I need as much power from portals as I can get, and I need to get the super portal re-opened. The Combine will be battering on it anyway so the moment we let down the defences, it's going to pop open like a ripe melon. Somehow, I don't know how, you need to disable the defences at the right time.

It'll take me a week to reach the Borealis and then maybe a day to set it all up. Let the super portal open again in 8 days, 0800 GMT, and I'll do the rest. If I'm right, the linked array of portals will form a closed loop. There's a reference to it in the Aperture Science documentation - they call it the Ourorobos Protocol. It should take the whole lot out of circulation - the Black Mesa original, the super portal here and everything the combine is linking to - forever.

But I'm not sure where I'll be, because I'll be on board that thing when it enters the event horizon.

Well, I hope that I don't end up where I think I'm going to end up. Because I'm anything but a free man, Alyx, and I've been pushed around a lot. I'm a knight without an order and without freedom. Take the order and the free of out of Gordon Freeman, Alyx.

You get G-Man.

Maybe that's what's waiting for this version of me. If I succeed, I don't know if this will all wink out or whether you'll continue in parallel. But, either way, if I succeed, the Combine won't come any more.

I've taken the suit and the Gravity gun. For old time's sake, I've taken a crowbar too.

Have a good life. Hate me if you have to. Forgive me.

G.