Yeah, you see a lot of these when some of your friends are psychology majors and they're all off a standard template. She signs everything that needs signing and hands them all back.

"OK....great," Munshi says, looking quickly over the forms checking signature boxes. He gestures are a chair, surrounded by the assembly of server racks, looking like a dentist's chair and with a...helmet-like thing hanging over it. "If you want to sit down, we can get started. Shouldn't take too long at all, it's all warmed up."

She takes a seat. It's a lot like waiting for her hair to dry at the hairdresser's except presumably it won't make the fan noise.

It actually looks like it might--the inside of the helmet as it drops down has a big screen across the front, and various fans and speaker grills, like the inside of a fancy VR rig. "All right, here we go," Munshi says, typing away on the laptop. "Baseline reference neurograph, version 5. Data pipeline's in order, scanner's all good." Over his shoulder, he says, "This shouldn't hurt a bit, just like having your picture taken." He types a few more things. "All right, say cheese!" There's a hum from someplace behind the server racks, and a hair-standing-on-end feeling, and then it's like there's a bright light coming from the screen, from the sides of the helmet, light everywhere, like a flashlight in her eyes, like it's seeping up her optic nerve and flowing into her head, and she can't move, all sense of time wrong as it ramps up in what feel like seconds but happens all at once...and then everything goes black.

What--

What?

Is there any sensory input to be had around here? (Did they mess up the scanner so badly it gave her a seizure?)

For an indefinitely infinite moment, the blackness is everything, a complete absence of qualia and then it becomes more just...darkness. Her vision is blurred, but clearing, and as her brain adjusts she recognizes there's a dim light seeping up the bottom of the helmet. The fan in the helmet is audible again, and then it shuts off, and the helmet retracts with a click, leaving behind darkness lit vaguely with a single red emergency light.

Bleeh. She feels vaguely awful and whatever went wrong with the scan is apparently either a cause or an effect of a power outage. "What just happened?" She asks, standing up and running a hand through her hair.

There's no hair, just a vague pressure on her head from her hand. For a moment that leaves her unsteady on her feet. It feels vaguely like some kind of suit? There's a slight stiffness or rustle as she tries it again.

She thought she had seen the helmet folding back up? She tries to push it off again, but no, it's built into the suit covering the rest of her. She examines her hands and arms and legs, mostly by prodding but a bit by vision as her eyes start adjusting to the dark. She's super disoriented, like those moments in the middle of falling asleep where her brain starts losing track of her body and it feels like her legs go on forever or something.

The helmet's definitely part of the suit on further inspection. As her eyes adjust to the dimness of the emergency lighting, she can see that the chair she was sitting in isn't quite the same as the one she was in a moment ago. The single red light lighting the room seems like it's not a bulb, more like...the glow from something with a light inside it. It's some kind of panel, leaning open, across the room.

Oooookay this is not what she thought was happening. She couldn't have instantly ended up in a big suit like this in a different place, so either she's been unconscious for a while or, more likely, someone figured out how to run the brain scan and she's in some kind of virtual environment. It's a really good one, too; she's got proprioception and everything . . . okay, not everything. She isn't breathing. She doesn't have the option of breathing; it's like that muscle just isn't there. That's so weird. Now she's expecting to feel like she needs to breathe and being surprised that she doesn't. Which, for something that's sort of the biological opposite of a panic attack, is pretty disturbing.

She needs to stop worrying about that and figure out what sort of situation she's in and why. If it's become possible to run her brain it could be any amount of time in the future and pretty much anything could be happening. There could be whole cities of virtual people. She could be being run by another instance of herself. She could be the five hundredth one of her in this exact situation and someone somewhere could be complaining about how Margarets always take so long to boot up. It's the embarrassment of that last thought that finally gets her to walk over to the glowing panel and investigate it.

A few steps...a few steps that feel slightly wrong, and echo with a rustle and a dull metal-on-metal clunk....a few steps bring her to the panel. The red light is a few LEDs glowing dimly inside a panel set into an array of wires running along the wall. The cover hanging off exposes  a big, plastic-covered switch. It's not labeled, at least not anywhere Margaret can see, but it looks like a safety shut-off switch.

Margaret gets distracted by her own legs halfway to the panel and eventually determines that she's probably taller now. Of all the weird ways to accidentally or deliberately mess up a simulated body, why that one? If it's accidental that's bad news because who knows what other parts of her world will have mistakes in them, but also maybe good news because it means the technology is probably still young and she hasn't missed a thousand years.

She does eventually get to the panel, determines that she doesn't particularly want to shut anything off, and then pulls the switch anyway because if this is a designed environment it's obvious that she's supposed to pull the switch. Maybe this is what people who run her set up so they can go do other stuff while she freaks out and get alerted once she's able to do stuff.

Maybe the switch was off to begin with, or maybe it was some kind of reset, because it freely swings from its current position, but takes a little shove to click into place in the other one. As it seats, there's a slight arcing crackle, and then lights start coming on. First, it turns out Margaret's standing next to a window, as a series of red lights in the corridor outside, then a couple overhead flood lights come on in the room she's in, and then various task lights start coming on. It reveals some kind of...work room? to her right, beside the corridor window, is a closed door with an access button glowing red, and then on the other side of the doorway is something labeled a "service console". At least ISO 9001 labeling standards are still a thing in the simulation. Or the future. Or the simulated future. Everything is metal or high-impact plastic and distinctly chunky in the way of industrial equipment designed for heavy use.

In the opposite corner from Margaret, just passed a distinctly non-industrial looking chair, the kind of stacking chair Margaret associates with a large assembly or concert in an improvised auditorium or banquet hall, are racks for six of some kind of suit, each with a racked angular helmet and a suit hanging below. Suits 05 and 06 are missing. Beside that, in the final corner and back the way Margaret came in this body with its incorrectly long legs, is a chair of the kind Munshi's lab had, but more polished. Fewer loose wires, more colored highlights, and a more compact array of server racks in the final corner linked to it by a few discrete conduits. This is that chair as a Product (tm). Somebody from the Marketing team and the Human Factors team had input in the meetings, and then Field Service got to complain a few times and...there is a stain on the floor. A red stain, just in front of the chair. And then some kind of shattered chunk of industrial robotics, in front of a shelving unit that looks right out of a McMaster catalogue. And beside that, just to Margaret's left, is a wall cubby with some kind of...thing growing out of it, like a shielded flex cable sheath an inch in diameter has forced its way out of the wall like a root and knocked some other equipment loose.

This is all very weird and kind of gross and makes no sense. Having a brain scanning chair in a virtual environment also makes no sense, but the alternative is that someone figured out how to reverse-brain-scan someone into someone else's body, which, why. Even if you scanned the original inhabitant out first, if you had somewhere else to put them why would you do the whole game of Musical Skulls. (She's not blind to the other possiblity, that she's a very elaborate murder weapon, but she doesn't want to go there without some actual reason to believe it. Hopefully the stains on the floor are not one; she doesn't feel injured anywhere.)

Whichever it is, she definitely didn't wake up in the here and now of her own accord, so someone must have done it and they must have had a reason. She starts circling the room, trying doors as she comes to them, keeping the wall on her right.

There's only the one door, the one locked beside her, that she sees.

Starting around the room counterclockwise, she passes the shelving racks, laden with a few binders and some totes full of unidentifiable spare parts. One rack's upper shelf holds a tank of some kind, with a label partially in...Japanese? Korean? Chinese? Some kind of Asian script she doesn't recognize specifically. There's a control console on one of the server racks, with industrially-ruggedized keyboard and a screen displaying the message "Automated: Unlock terminal from Service Console".

On closer inspection, the chair's got some kind of plastic cushions, like the booth of a diner. What looked like an abstract design from across the room seems to say closer up "SCX 303" and the head rest says, "Mind your head, lean back." Probably not a murder weapon, murder weapons aren't labeled for user safety.

The suit racks have a bench, apparently to sit on while you don or doff one. They look heavier than a wetsuit, more like a spacesuit? Whatever they are, they come with a helmet and special boots, and a couple terminals on sliding overhead supports would allow working on them if they weren't turned off. Behind the chair on the wall next to the service console is another electrical panel, this one closed, and bearing a warning to always wear gloves and eye protection before working on panels. The Service Console declares it is the place to service tool and cortex chips for Omnitools, and a large screen sits beside a mount for...some kind of device. Apparently it wants an Omnitool, since the screen says "Pathos II: Service Console, Insert Omnitool to Access".

Beside the service console, in the corner, is another one of those shielded cables burst through the wall, leading into a rubbery mass clinging to the wall, with some vague chunks of technical-looking metal poking out of it. It looks vaguely...Borg, or something science fictional. Directly next to the door is some kind of panel, maybe communications since it has what looks like a phone keypad and a speaker grill, and what looks like a camera lens pointed where a user would be standing at it. Under that is a fire extinguisher, and then the door and the associated locked panel next to the glass.

Okay, so she needs an omnitool to use the service console to use the terminal. She goes around the room again, looking through all the lose parts for objects shaped to fit in the service console's port. And also checks whether this suit has any pockets, because if there was ever a time for finding what you're looking for in your own pocket it's when it wasn't yours an hour ago.

The suit does indeed have small pockets sewn to the outer layer, but checking them doesn't seem to turn up anything that looked like the Omnitool shown on the Service Console's sign. No omnitool turns up checking the room, either, or in the hallway outside the glass window.

She goes through the whole accessible area several times and determines that one, if there's an omnitool in here she's not going to find it, and two, this whole area is not at all what she'd expect from either a virtual environment or somewhere you would go to install a new mind in someone's brain. For one thing, it's very cluttered. For another, it's all, well, gross. Rusty and grimy and that's not even getting into whatever those cables are doing. She's pretty glad she's wearing this suit, actually, especially the gloves. 

She tries yelling "Hello?" and similar a few times to see if whoever woke her up is around but apparently not. Then she tries prying open the latches on the doors with some of the metallic junk lying around. It's not breaking and entering; it's breaking and exiting.

It doesn't work, the grooves in the casing of the door mechanism aren't really deep enough to give her purchase. On her third attempt, her improvised prybar slips, and smacks into the glass, which cracks slightly.

Well that's embarrassing. On the other hand, she's not the one who locked her into a creepy empty room and wandered off somewhere. Maybe she should smash the window and get out that way.

As soon as she has that thought, some part of her becomes bizzarely confident that if she does it, someone will immediately show up to berate her for being a vandal and failing to solve the puzzle, and show her the obvious solution that was right under her helmeted nose. She does another circuit of the room, turning over every random object to see if it is, or is concealing, an omnitool or a key or a piece of paper with a riddle on it or whatever.

Nope.

At least if someone shows up to berate her she'll be interacting with another living being who might know if she's in a physical body or not. And if this is all virtual then smashed glass can be repaired in an instant, and if it isn't then it probably isn't a puzzle and might, from the look of things, be some kind of emergency. 

She puts the fire extinguisher through the window, then, because you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, does it several more times until there's a big enough hole that she can get through without cutting the suit. She's gotten kind of fond of the suit.

Climbing through the broken frame takes some care, and using the chair helps, but finally Margaret's in the hallway outside what is, apparently, the "Tech Depot". A four-armed device labeled "Pneumatic Seal" is on the outside of the door--probably why it won't open. A large handle presents itself, and no one immediately comes to investigate the noise.

The hall is shortest to the left, and Margaret starts exploring that way. Just a few steps bring her to the end of the hallway. Her steps are coming less awkwardly as she moves around, perhaps from growing used to this body's other proportions or perhaps just losing it in the awkwardness of the suit. At the end of the hallway, a gated passage turns a corner and continues straight through a T-junction. The straight passage she can see down doesn't go far before it turns again--seriously, who designed this labyrinth?--but the passage to the right has a label "Thermal Plant". The gate is locked, and rattling it produces no change. The other wall of the passage has a large grating blocking entrance into some kind of machine space, with various pipes passing through some kind of vertical shaft which passes quickly behind a bulkhead above and below the deck level. The gating seems bolted closed, and is labeled with warnings about electrical components, hot pipes, and confined space permits. One of the overhead pipes is leaking, as a trickle of water flows down a wall just where the pipe penetrates the end wall.

The other way, to the right of the Tech Depot, the hallways opens up into what's almost a mall atrium. On the left (the wall opposite the tech depot) there's a short side corridor with signs for a bathroom and Break Room. On the right, there's another gated passage, also locked, and another entrance with one of the four-clawed pneumatic seals over it, this one to the "Machine Hangar". An overhead crane rail comes out of the door, and turns to the far end of the hallway/atrium, where what looked to be a wall turns out to hold a larger door with its activator panel not even red, but simply off. Where it leads is curiously unlabeled, considering everything else is clearly labeled--looking back to the tech depot, the wall next to the gate where the atrium narrows back to the initial hallway has a list of possible destinations. The "Tech Depot" and "Thermal Plant" are back down the small corridor, the "Observation Tower," "Observation Tunnel," and "Security" are through the second locked gate off the atrium, and the "Break Room" is here off the atrium.

She is still so confused about whether she's in a simulation or not. On the one hand, simulations need bathrooms even less than they need grimy walls. On the other hand, the mention of bathrooms makes her notice that she doesn't have any of the annoying internal sensations associated with having organs, and also she still isn't breathing and still can't hear her own heartbeat even though she's creeped out enough that it ought to be really loud. 

Wait, hang on, if she isn't breathing how was she talking earlier? She tries it again and realizes she can hear her voice but can't feel her mouth moving. What on Earth? Maybe she's in a robot body that's set up to feel vaguely human and doesn't need to eat or breathe or use the bathroom. That would be pretty awesome, actually. She goes into the bathroom to see if it's a fully stocked bathroom or some kind of robot plumbing repair area or an empty room that nobody uses or what.

It definitely looks like a bathroom, sink and soap dispenser and a single toilet in its own stall, apparently with a bidet as there's a nozzle in the bowl and no toilet paper to be found. Above the sink is a mirror and looking back is...a suit like the ones hanging back in the Tech Depot. That shouldn't really have been a surprise, but what is are the two glowing lights in the darkness behind the glass faceplate.

The suit is expected but the lights aren't; they're not bright enough or focused enough to act as headlights. She leans in and tilts her head around, trying to see past them to see if there's a (probably unfamiliar) human face behind them or if it's entirely a robot body.