"Got it." She exits the room again, keeping one eye camera out for the laboratory and the other for "that brute".

There's no sign of the brute as she makes her way back to the laboratory back the way she came in. As she does, Catherine's voice comes over the PA speakers. "I wonder what happened to this place, all the cameras show static. The tower, the welcome center, the shuttle station..." This time, the lab door button glows a happy green and opens when pressed, revealing a computer workstation with a chair, and another across the room. The computer screen shows, "ARK data recovered, hit any button to continue." After tapping the keyboard, the screen chases a loading bar and loads a menu: "Opnion Poll," "ARK Environments," "ARK Schematics," "Calibration Survey v0.3," and "ARK Tracker."

Opinion poll? Never mind, the most important one is clearly "ARK Tracker". Where does it say the ARK is?

The tracker needs a little help, narrowing down initially from "on Earth" vs "In Space" to (after some searching) the Atlantic ocean, off the Azores. It shows a map of the facility, including the familiar "Upsilon," "Lambda," and the un-seen "Theta," but also Omicron, Delta, Tau, Phi, and Omega. It looks like Omega, Phi, and Tau at least are off the continental shelf, with Delta on a small secondary plateau. From the map, it looks like Theta is the largest of the stations...and the ARK is at Tau, apparently in one of the back rooms. "Margaret, any luck? Any information on if they launched it? Did they even finish it?"

Margaret's heart sinks. "It says it's in Tau. Do you think--do you think there's anyone on the surface to launch it, if we can get it there?"

"It's only at Tau? Oh, they got it so close. Phi's the base of the space gun, but the ARK will only last a few decades at most on Earth."

"The space gun is under the ocean?"

"Well, most of it. You know, Pathos-II, 'Your expressway to the Stars'? I guess you really must be from 2015. Pathos-II is a former mining site and geothermal energy plant, and then they used the sea bottom as the base for the Omega Space Gun, a 7.25 kilometer long magnetic accelerator. It can launch ten tons into orbit for only a few hundred euros per kilogram. Phi's the service station for the launch operations staff based at Tau, down in the abyss. That's what most of the station was to support, payload preparation, power generation, and then the research team piggybacking on the support down here."

Yes, she's from 2015, about time someone believed her.

She tries to figure out how much improvement in launch costs that is, runs into a wall of not know how much the Euro has inflated, and decides she doesn't care. 

"So we need to get it from Tau to Phi--do you think the launch staff are still there, will they be able to launch it?"

"I don't know, maybe, but they haven't yet."

"So I guess we just--try to get down there and find it and see what's preventing it from being launched?" It occurs to her that if it isn't launched they might be able to transfer themselves into it--but then they might have to be outside of it to launch it--no, don't think about that, one problem at a time.

"We'd need to find a way to get down into the abyss--can't take the Climber without a Power Suit," Catherine sighs in a moment of PA static. "We'd probably have to go to Theta and pray the DUNBAT's still working."

"Alright. What's the DUNBAT?" Also she pulls up the "ARK environments" page on the terminal, since the tracker is hardly telling her anything new.

The "ARK environments" tab is a glossy set of renders of a very photorealistic interior on a live loop, showing a forest with a walking path over a river, a city, and an urban park square--apparently the interior. "It's a DSRV, a submarine designed for high pressures. It's supposed to be for research out on the continental shelf and servicing on the gun, as well as for any supplies they couldn't take down on the climber, but it's always been a bit hit or miss. The wranglers at Theta were always complaining about it."

That looks like a nice place to live.

"Okay. Um, stupid question, is this something we ride in or something we remote-control or something one of us rides in and the other one bodyswaps into or what?"

"It's something you'd ride in. Normally, the pilot would control it with a pilot seat, like a giant robot. I....think it might have a cortex mount, too? But I'm not sure how we'd swap you--I've got no hands for it."

"Honestly I don't even know where my cortex chip is, if that's what I'm running on. For that matter, do you have any idea how I got into this body? I just woke up in an empty room and I haven't found anyone who might have done it."

"No, I don't even know how a scan that old got down here or manages to work," Catherine says. "I'd heard things went crazy at Upsilon, though."

"They really really did. Oh, I just remembered--there was a little submarine outside the airlock I entered Lambda through, about van-sized, called itself an 'escape vessel'. Does that sound useful at all?" 

Also, what's in the "opinion poll" file? People's opinions on what the ARK environment should have in it?

It looks like tapes from three interviews, with a "Robin Bass," and "Ian Pederson,' and a "Mark Sarang." On the recording, Catherine asks them if they're excited about the ARK and what they think of the project. Robin seems slightly unconvinced that the ARK will save more than a part of what they are, but feels it's important even so. Ian offers the opinion that it's a great idea, if only to have something to do, and that there shouldn't be a problem building the spacecraft portion of the ARK. Sarang says the idea is just incredible, and makes him think about what it means to be human--and that the ARK represents "not just restricted to our digital progeny, but a means of actual survival" to go on living through the "reality of continuity".

"An escape vessel," Catherine muses. "I didn't think we had any assigned. They're also not deep-sea capable, but it might help us get to Theta and see about the DUNBAT."

"It was kind of banged-up looking, but I didn't stick around long enough to get a sense of how fixable it was. The computer was working, so I could go plug you into it, if you wanted."

"I guess it's worth a try. You should see if there's anything else salvageable here, and then we should check it out."

"Will do. Actually, one more thing," she says as she starts searching for useful-looking things to add to her toolkit. "Those places where tubes and gel are coming out of the walls--what's up with that? Did this place have some kind of gel plumbing system that exploded?"

"It's part of the WAU, the station's Warden Unit. The WAU is tasked with maintaining the station's systems and supporting the crew, and uses a kind of encodable hydrocarbon matrix gel which can carry and store power, and be converted by the instructions into a kind of polymer to serve as a temporary patch in the structure. It had been starting to spread, we thought due to the damage to the station systems caused by the impact."

"That's pretty cool. Almost like a liquid battery." Also it sort of explains why she felt better after compulsively sticking her arm in it one time, if she was drawing power from it somehow. "Should I bring you out to the submarine now? . . . Are you going to go unconscious when you're not plugged into a console?"