Down the corridor, there's a locked door to some kind of laboratory on her left, and then another door, also locked, on the right. The hallway brings her to a kind of atrium around four pillars that look structural, or electrical, or something. Industrial, anyway, instead of the strange biological appearance of the tentacables, though there's a few pots in the corridor of the black gel oozing out of the corners where the walls meet the roof like poorly applied caulking. Structure gel...maybe badly applied caulk isn't a bad metaphor? Anyway, a door at the left side of the atrium beckons, and from it comes Catherine's voice. "Margaret? Are you there? I'm hurt."

"I'm coming!" Is the door open, or openable?

The door stands open, leading into a control station. It's filled with a few large pieces of equipment in the center. The right side has something like the service console from the Tech Depot at Upsilon, with a slot for an omnitool, and a workbench scatter with tools. On the left side there's control panels and storage along the walls. There's no sign of a person, but on the ground in front of one of the panels on the left is a robot. This one has a monitor for a "head", and looks like it had legs and a claw arm at some point, but it's badly damaged. One leg and most of the arm are ripped off, leaving it leaking black gel onto the metal tile floor. It...no, she turns her head up towards Margaret. "Margaret, right here," Catherine says.

Margaret has finally found the one person who sounded like she could take charge and fix things, and she's also worse off than Margaret is and she would absolutely cry about this if she had eyes so it's arguably good that she doesn't. 

"Hi." Whatever is generating her voice picks up that it should be weak and hesitant just like vocal cords would have done. "Do you--know how to repair yourself, can I help . . . ?"

Catherine tips her monitor back and forth in something like a shake of the head. "I don't think this body's repairable. Upsilon might have spares for some of this, but it'd take a lot of work. I was trying to check on the status of my project when that brute knocked me to the ground, and I've been stuck on the floor here since." She waves the stump of an arm and the broken leg twitches. "Any chance you can help me check it?"

"Yes. What's the project?" She looks at the service console and the work bench, trying to figure out what Catherine was doing, and silently curses the irony that she had already left a flooded Upsilon by the time Catherine started needing spare parts from it.

"My project? Oh! Well, we saved all the people on the station as brain scans and put them into an artificial world. We were going to launch it into space to save it from...uh, well, all of this."

"Oh wow. Oh wow. That's." That's what hope looks like, followed by agonizing uncertainty as the implications of "we were going to" catch up to her. "Is that still possible? Is the artificial world running alright where it is? How do I check?"

"I don't know. There was some structural damage to Lambda when I woke up, and I couldn't override the doors to get access to the lab down the hall--some damage control protocol. I was trying to get an omnitool working, and got this door open, and then that brute hit me. It's been back a few times since, including just now." She seems to look at Margaret's tool box for the first time. "You have an omnitool! Can you try it on the computer over there?"

"I do!" Swipe! "Also should I be, like, barricading the door or something, if it might come back again?"

"I don't know if it can open doors, it only came in here once I opened the door," Catherine says. There's one of the button pads next to the door. For its part, the omnitool locks into the dock with a click, and then after a loading bar the screen displays, "Welcome, L. Meuron (UPSILON)". "Did it work?" Catherine asks.

"Yes!" As she shuts the door and looks at the console's options she wonders whether L. Meuron is dead, or running on a server at a space launch facility somewhere.

The screen doesn't seem to want to give a menu, just hanging on the "Welcome" screen as the onboard AI says. "Lambda...terminal...27...activated."

"OK. I think the best way for you to do this is if you grab my cortex chip, and plug it into the tool. I'll power down, and then you should be able to grab the cortex chip from the slot behind the monitor, and install it into the omnitool on the console."

That sounds a lot like "pull my brain out and stick it somewhere"! "Okay but, um, please remember that I am literally from the 2010s and don't know a lot of obvious things. Is there anything at all to it other than 'pull the chip out of that slot and put it in that other slot'?"

"Nope, it should be pretty simple. It's a standardized conne..." The robot's monitor powers off and it drops down as Catherine cuts off mid-sentence. A small cover on the back marked "Cortex Acc." pops open, and there's what looks like a hand-sized disk drive. A pull of a sliding button, and it slips free. She slips free? Is the chip Catherine if she's on it, even if she's not running?

That timing weirdness does Not fill her with confidence but Margaret pulls the chip out and sticks it/her in the omnitool. Does she have a chip like that? How easily could she be removed from this body and stuck in another one, if there was anything better available?Maybe she could swap places with the entity that attacked Catherine. This is a bad plan for several reasons, starting with "it/they wouldn't cooperate" and going through "would I even know how to operate arbitrary limbs" to finish up at "actually having opposable thumbs and a normal voice is worth putting up with disgustingness I guess". Still, worth asking about, she concludes as the omnitool and the cortex chip figure each other out.

Catherine's cortex chip has a couple blobs and squiggles of the structure gel and tentacables on it, but it slots solidly into the omnitool with a click. The voice of the built-in AI chimes in: "Custom cortex chip found. Shutting down Helper Jane. Have a nice day."

The screen on the console lights up with the same static picture of Catherine's...well, human face from the comm calls earlier. "...ector, pretty much all of them will fit...huh. This...feels weird. I'm in the omnitool? Thanks."

"Yup, you're in the omnitool. And you continued your sentence from before you . . . turned yourself off . . . so probably you're okay? Um, what do we do now, do you know if we can do anything to help Amy and Carl?"

"I don't know, we'd need to get back to Upsilon. You said Amy was still alive? Where? How? We'd heard she never made it to Theta. And you said Carl was in a robot? Like, all of him? Like me?"

"Amy's in the shuttle station at upsilon--stuck to a blob of gel--she said it's keeping her alive . . . Carl is like you but he was--weird, he kept insisting he was human and had human arms and stuff. But he was--I found his body."

"Carl was like me? That's strange. I never scanned him," Catherine says. "Or at least...I hadn't when I made the version of me that I am. The living Catherine...maybe she did? But that doesn't make any sense, if he was dead before they made the evacuation attempt, I couldn't have. Are you sure he was like me? There'd been other robots around, acting strange, with fragments of voice communications. Reed had been looking into it last a couple weeks before...well, anyway. That was a lot longer ago than a week now. More important right now is to find out about the ARK. I don't know what happened to it, the living Catherine might even have already launched it. Can you help me?"

"I never met Carl, he could have been someone else pretending. I will absolutely help with the ARK; what do I need to do?" The possibility that some people got out, that humanity can keep existing indefinitely, is a better reason to keep moving than she's had since . . . in a while.

"Let me see what I can find in the backup files, I should be able to finish restoring them." Catherine says. "...Ah. Well, that's got it, but I don't seem to be able to access the files I need in this condition. Can you go check the systems in the laboratory down the hall? They should have a way to tell me if the ARK is safe. I've got the door unlocked."

"Sure. Um, should I bring you or leave you here?"

"Leave me plugged in so I can see what's going on with the servers. The omnitool doesn't have the power to image a full Cortex chip on its own."