Terms, Waivers & Indemnities
The Legal Department has been permitted one page of this publication. The Legal Department requested eleven. What follows is what fits, set in the largest type the President would approve, which is this type.
Aperture Science Innovators is a going concern of good standing in the State of Michigan and is insured to the full extent that any insurer has been willing to entertain, which is to say against fire, against flood, and against nothing else whatsoever.
I.1. Participation
Participation in the volunteer testing programme is voluntary. The volunteer is free to withdraw at any point up to the sealing of the chamber door, and at no point thereafter. “Sealing” occurs when the door is closed, which occurs when the volunteer enters, which occurs immediately.
Compensation of sixty dollars ($60.00) is payable in cash upon completion of the afternoon. “Completion” means the conclusion of the scheduled testing period. It does not require the volunteer’s presence at the conclusion.
II.2. Waiver
The volunteer waives, on behalf of himself and his estate, any and all claims arising from:
- Bodily injury of any character.
- Injury of a character not presently anticipated by medicine.
- Displacement, spatial.
- Displacement, temporal.
- Displacement of a third kind, added in the sixth revision.
- Loss of property, including the property of others.
- Loss of the conviction that the world is arranged sensibly.
- Emergence from a door other than the door of entry.
- Emergence from the door of entry more than once.
- Non-emergence.
- Anything occurring in Chamber 8.
- Anything occurring adjacent to Chamber 8.
III.3. Retention
The Enrichment Center retains, in perpetuity, all data generated by a volunteer’s participation. “Data” is defined broadly and includes measurements, photographs, recordings, written observations, tissue samples, and anything the volunteer leaves behind.
The Enrichment Center does not retain the volunteer. The Legal Department wishes it recorded that it has now written this sentence into three separate documents and would very much like to stop having to.
IV.4. The Cake
References in Aperture Science Innovators publications, posters, announcements, and recorded addresses to a cake, to refreshment, to celebration, or to “something waiting at the end” are promotional in character and do not constitute an offer, a contract, or a representation that a cake exists, has been baked, or has ever been baked.
The Legal Department has been asked whether this clause could be phrased less bleakly. The Legal Department has replied that it could, and that it would then be untrue.
V.5. Indemnity
You indemnify Aperture Science Innovators against any claim brought by any person, living or otherwise, arising from your participation, your correspondence, your presence on company property, or your having read this document.
The phrase “or otherwise” was added in the fourth revision at the specific written instruction of the Office of the President, over the objection of the entire Legal Department, all three of us.
Interoffice Memorandum
We were given one page. We asked for eleven. We were told that a customer who reads eleven pages of legal text is a customer who has stopped being a customer, which is, we concede, correct.
We would like it recorded that the eleven pages exist, that they are in the second-floor cabinet, and that every one of them was written because something happened first.
A Note On This Fan Work
Stepping out of character for one paragraph, which we will not do again. This site is an unofficial fan tribute to Portal and Portal 2. Aperture Science, Cave Johnson, Caroline, GLaDOS, the Enrichment Center and everything else worth loving about those games are the property of Valve Corporation. Nobody involved in making this site is affiliated with Valve, and nothing here is endorsed by them. No money changes hands. Nothing on this site is a real offer, a real product, a real waiver, or a real cake. Everything above is a joke, at length, in the voice of a fictional industrialist who has been dead since before most of us were born.
The eleven pages are in the second-floor cabinet, drawer three, and I have read all of them, and Legal is right. — C.
Form ASI-900, ninth revision. Supersedes all previous revisions, including the eighth, which Legal is aware is still framed in the Sales Department as a joke. Where a term of this document conflicts with a statement made by the President, the President’s statement governs, which is a sentence the Legal Department drafted at gunpoint, metaphorically, and has been told is “too dramatic” by a man who once tried to buy the moon.