rough plot is that josh & jeff die in a hostile fauna incident (peeper puppies, etc), forcing espunit & benry to huddle down and annoy each other so bad they both accidentally reveal themselves to each other as rogue secunits, probably after benry let espunit get an arm torn off. ("reveal". benry knew lol, he even suspected it was a corpo plant. obvi he didn't know the full extent of it bc the full extent of it is DUMB BULLSHIT THAT NOBODY SHOULD HAVE APPROVED, BREEN.)

uh, forzen– when the imposter is sus– forzen does some corporate allegiance fuckshit (they need him at youtube!!) which forces espunit to kill him (I <3 killing forzen), and this makes darnold call for Immediate Fucking Retreat To BlackMesa, This Is Too Much!! and then they go, and there are a bunch of cute little bonding sequences, and espunit is lying to itself like "this is great, I have no horrible feelings about completing the stupid mission I was assigned to and betraying these very annoying people who will get me out of this hellhole alive on purpose because they think I'm nice to be around and a person."

CUT TO A WEEK LATER

"oh god I can;t fucking do it" but obviously! it has to keep kayfabe!!! and it can't Turn Off Kayfabe. until bubby notices something's off and, with the combined efforts of coomer spamming it with salutations & the undiluted processing power of Bombast (which is bubby, obviously, the bot is an ART-Drone-alike, the Bombast is bubby. it is so so important that I figure out a way to get a EspUnit "GOD, MAN, FUCK THE SHIP!"
Coomer "I do!"
EsUnit "…EW.") anyway, they manage to crack into its code like a partially organic coconut, revealing that PSYCH! NONE OF THIS IS REAL TO ESPUNIT! and like, obviously by this point in time it IS and they're FRIENDS but that's not exactly something that you can pull out and read the same way as you can do for kayfabe & all those true mission parameters.

(I know you can because it's a secunit but pretend that the espunit makeover actually did something to prevent that, I don't know, this is fanfiction for a fucking videogame machinima improv. the scifi is so soft it might as well be shaving cream, alright, exact coding specifics is not what anyone is here for. and my roommate's too far behind in her computer science class to explain theoreticals of it to me, anyway.)

and then they almost take it back to JustEnt. V (with Tommy being the only one who's actually on its side) but along the way the crew get roped into… something with GeoCase, which is another corpo that tommy's dad is the representative of…? uh, and like, GMan also takes a look into espunit's head and recognizes the code(?????) and is like. "ah… this must have been the last thing he did before dying for those… ahem, 'freedom,' 'fighters'…" and gives them all of espunit's old memories.

kayfabe.exe was written by one dr. gordon freeman, who had also worked extensively (and secretly) with an alyx vance formerly of justent.v, now with geocase. secunit had been rogue for a LONG ASS TIME, ACTUALLY, having fully developed its own personality & place in the crack team of rebels against justent.v's absolute corporate fuckshit, before alyx had to run for her fucking life (maybe eli died??) and it was a real problem that secunit would know where she was, everything she'd done, and also the entire ring of spies. so dr. freeman wiped it. justent.v knew he'd done something to it, so they came up with this bullshit valorant defenders scheme & gave dr. freeman plenty of room to work on his secunit in secret, assuming he'd put its memories back in it once he assumed he hadn't been caught. he probably would have, they were friends, but alyx had the only copies and freeman couldn't recover anything past the wipe bc it was all in secunit's organics.

espunit now has everybody's trust back, a chance at getting kayfabe deleted, and a friend to memorialize. I think he doesn't actually want to be called Gordon but the survey team starts doing it Assuming he would and he can't actually correct them. uhh, he Assumes the creepy favors that gman's calling in to get kayfabe removed are going to be evil scary things and instead it's just "look after my little boy :]" and gordon's like. "uh. h-he's 36?"
":]"
"y. yeah. no I'll. look after. the 36 year old man who saved my life when a ship with the processing power of thirty suns tried to kill me."

and then they all make it black into BackMesa and live happily ever after except that obviously they don't because it's still a corpo & benry is there & everybody's calling him by the name of his dead friend gordon freeman. they put it on his id.

fuck This Unit's baka life.