"Alright. Here goes."

It would be very appropriate to gulp, here. She cannot gulp. She boots up Brandon Wan.

The scan loads in, and then in an anticlimax, it presents a list of options:

Oh, right, of course it wouldn't have a default environment. Ski lodge; run.

The simulation takes a moment to load, then a rendered video appears of a man in a scan chair in a swiss chalet, in front of a cozy-looking fire. 

"That wasn't so bad," he says. "Strohmeier really got me worked up, the bastard." He pauses, seeming to take in the room. "Wha...what is this? Where am I?" His "stress levels" start spiking.

"Just relax, Mr. Wan. Everything's OK," Catherine says.

Brandon puts his hands on the arms of the chair, looking to pull himself up. "Dr. Chun? What the hell is this place?"

"It's a virtual environment that isn't the ARK," says Margaret. "Catherine and I--my name's Margaret; we haven't met--are trying to launch the ARK into space, but we need your help to get down to Tau."

"Down to Tau? Who the hell are you? What do you want from me?"

"I'm an old brain scan who got woken up down here by accident, and I'm trying to get myself into the ARK and launch it. We--Catherine and I--need the new security cipher to get to the DUNBAT."

"You're an old brain scan...what? Is this some kind of trick? Chun, what hell is this? Is this a joke!?"

"I swear it isn't a joke or a trick." Hopefully Catherine has some way to prove at least her own identity.

"This isn't a trick, Mr. Wan. We just need a favor--do you know anything about the security cypher to get into the DUNBAT hangar?"

"No, no, this is a trick, this whole thing isn't real. You want something from me. You're not Chun at all, are you? You won't break me, WAU. You hear me!?" Brandon starts pulling himself to his feet.

"Brandon, we are not the WAU." Brandon thinks the WAU can talk and has theory of mind? No time for that. "Catherine, can you tell him something about yourself the WAU wouldn't know?"

"If he thinks that the WAU is stealing scans to get information from him, I don't know what I could tell him that stealing my scan wouldn't tell the WAU," Catherine says. "But Mr. Wan, I promise you, we're really ourselves. We just need the cypher to get to the DUNBAT. It's important to everyone in the ARK."

"Important? Hah!" Brandon bursts out, standing up and pacing around the chair. The "stress levels" are starting to shoot off the charts. "No, I don't know who are you--Chun, or the WAU, or someone else, but I'm not giving you anything!"

"Brandon, please. If we're telling the truth, helping us is the only way to make sure the ARK is safe. If we're lying, what would the WAU even want with the DUNBAT?"

"What does it want with anything? Crazy robots in Upsilon, stuff leaking out of the walls. Nothing it does has made sense since the damn impact," Brandon says. He reaches over and, impressively, snaps the wooden chair in the scene apart with a crack. He pulls loose one of the broken legs as a club. "Come on, you want some? Try me!"

"We don't want to hurt you. Wait, can you even see us right now or are we just disembodied voices?"

Wan turns around, surveying the area warily with his club. "No, where are you!"

"Oh crap, no wonder we come off as super creepy! We're outside your virtual environment in the physical world. I would offer to join you in there and show my face but I don't know how, or how I would get back out again. Catherine, is there a way to give him access to a camera somewhere?"

"I don't know," Catherine says. "I'm not sure how I'd connect a video feed to the simulation."

"So, I'm just supposed to believe the voices from the air?" Brandon says. "I've got no proof who you are, or why you want the security cypher." He gestures with the chair leg club in  way way which would be very imposing if it weren't exactly the other way from the camera view Margaret's seeing.

Wait, shit, has Catherine been completely blind this whole time? Deal with it later.

"Okay, okay, hang on, if the WAU could read Catherine's mind for her history it could read your mind for the security cypher. So the fact that we're asking at all is proof that the WAU can't read Catherine's mind. So if Catherine can tell you some stuff that only the real Catherine would know, that's proof that she's the real Catherine!"

"The hell kind of logic is that?" Brandon says. "That assumes the WAU had access to Chun at all. And it assumes I'd know anything about her that no one else on the station would. If she just tells me her favorite color was purple or something, how the hell would I know?"