The Enrichment Center

The Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center is the research facility in which both Portal games are set, within the Half-Life universe, and the place where the portal gun was created. In Portal the AI GLaDOS runs the whole center, watching Chell through cameras and intercoms as she completes its test chambers, and the areas Chell explores after escaping into the maintenance sections suggest a vast installation. Before the first game GLaDOS flooded the center with neurotoxin and killed the scientists who built her, which is why it stands deserted. In Portal 2 Chell wakes in a stasis chamber inside the dilapidated center while GLaDOS rebuilds it, and the new characters Wheatley and Aperture founder Cave Johnson are introduced there.