Aaaaaaaaaagh what the fuck. Awful gross possibly-benevolent gel blob mind control thing. She has no idea if the sensations she's feeling are the cyborg equivalent of a mild ache or the cyborg equivalent of an oncoming heart attack and no way to get medical help either way because she is completely alone and lost and everything is awful.

At least she can't cry about it.

All she can do is keep moving along the duct in the only direction available.

The ducts are narrow, but not so narrow they can't be climbed through--apparently they're true access shafts, as overhead there's a neat tangle of pipes and ductwork, and the occasional server cluster mounted into a wall. As she climbs through, there's a spotlight that sweeps along the wall. The robot--the other robot?--is crawling in here too. It passes within a few seconds around the corners of the ducts. The area seems to go in circles before she realizes it's almost a figure 8, around two large "EXHAUST" lines. She's under, or just came from, an access to Robot Assembly, and the doors to Exhaust and Process Control are blocked by unresponsive red buttons. The door into Station Control, however, is responsive, and she climbs out of the duct into a room about twice the size of a living room into what would clearly be a control station even if not for the name. A pair of consoles look directly out through large windows into some space beyond, with yet another a locked door leading out the same wall. A second tier of consoles one step up has a pair of screens pointed down at it from the ceiling, too. A diagrammatic sign over the console where she climbs out helpfully explains: Upsilon Geothermal Power Plant, Pathos-II.

In the center of the room, there's a squatting, insectoid thing made of the gel-and-mechanisms combination. There's some kind of camera-thing on an arm that looks around slightly intermittently, though not in Margaret's direction or directly at any of the panels. Occasionally, one of the thing's vaguely arm-like appendages twitches, sometimes into line with the camera like it's looking at its hand. It's connected by two throbbing tentacables to two more of the power bulbs, which occasionally twitch like they're sucking something--the gel?--through them.

Margaret has very little clue what kind of entity this is or even what kind of entities are to be expected here and now, but hope springs eternal. "Hello?" she asks the gel and mechanisms. "Is anyone there?"

The question draws no reaction--the entity doesn't even pause in its cycle. Looking around the consoles, one of the two at the front seems to be some kind of communications panel--at the very least, it says "Radio Signal Blocked, Insufficient Power". On the access to the rear row of consoles, there's a note on a panel that's been covered with boils by the gel, on a remarkably normal-looking sticky note. "Don't touch the structure gel leakage. Can't confirm its effects on the WAU. Issue has been reported to SSE Wolzchek." Whatever power problems exist seems to be effecting the other computers too--none of them are responsive either.

Margaret follows the cables around and determines that the insectoid pile of stuff is pulling from the same power cables that are supposed to be powering all these consoles. Including, ironically, the console that could power on the geothermal plant. Can she, very carefully and using the longest screwdriver she has, poke it off of one of them?

It takes a bit of force, but one of the two cables falls loose. There's a flicker, again, and a flash of a single word: "Don't!" The thing on the floor, though, doesn't seem to have changed--it continues spasming randomly, and nothing happens trying to speak to it. Outside, the dark power plant lurks in a dim and vast room, the largest she's seen yet.

Aaaaaa what, is this a person after all, did she hurt them--but it doesn't respond when she asks "Are you okay", doesn't seem to have noticed her at all except for what could easily have been a recording. Can she turn the power plant on now, or is there still not enough power available?

The buttons for starting the plant remain resolutely red. The light on the bulb she disconnected has gone out, though, and trying to stick the cable back neither makes it "take" nor draws any reaction from the...entity.

Oh no, she's definitely injured the only other possibly-a-thinking-creature she's met in here. And it wasn't enough. If she wants the power on, and that sure seems like her best hope of a way to call for help, she has to hurt it/them again. Maybe fatally. 

She searches all the areas she can get to for some other kind of power source, or some way to another part of the facility. She tries to break the window to get into the power plant room and is defeated by the reinforced safety glass. She spends--some amount of time she doesn't keep track of--slumped against a wall.

And then she pulls out the second cable, and dashes over to start the power plant and get the cable plugged back in as fast as possible, just in case the problem last time was that she wasn't fast enough, or that there wasn't enough power.

It doesn't work. As soon as she pulls the cable, the display on the reactor control computer stabilizes, but the bulb goes dark. Trying to plug it back in proves no benefit. For the first and only time, the entity makes...eye contact? It turns its head to Margaret. "Why? I need that. I was...I was OK." Even as Margaret scrabbles to plug the cable back into the darkened bulb, the lights go out on the camera head, and it slumps down.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

She kind of wishes she could cry. She is pretty sure she just murdered someone and now she is EVEN MORE ALONE and also a MURDERER and everything just continues to get worse forever. She staggers over to the console and boots up the stupid fucking reactor because at least then there will have been some kind of point, sort of, even if the life she destroyed possibly had a longer life expectancy and was more worth living than her own life is right now.

The reactor console's glowing yellow activation button bears sad witness to the benefits of her possible, perhaps probable murder. A press, and the right-hand screen lights up. Apparently, there's some issue with the boot sequence, because it wants a "manual boot sequence" with the three main buttons on the console. Some experimentation shows they have to be activated in order, but not too quickly, and with not too long a pause after the second before the third, but then it comes online and completes the boot the rest of the way automatically. A screen flashes to a system display, and as it starts spinning up the turbines, there's a rumbling vibration from the room outside and the lights start to flicker on, first white task lighting, then (as the system comes to power) all the overheads. The system is now apparently online at 400 plus megawatts...and the bulbs are still dead. It's cold comfort that even if she could have figured that out fast enough, she's not sure she could have saved the entity she had to kill.

As the power comes on, the radio screen flickers to life. It tries, in order, Lisbon in Portugal, Cadiz in Spain, Site Delta, and Site Theta, all of which are OFFLINE. Site Lambda, though, is ONLINE. After a moment, a woman's voice comes over the radio.

"What, hello? Is somebody there?"

Person! Person! Talking person who is not dead! 

"Hello! I'm here, can you hear me?"

"Yes. Upsilon, what's going on?"

Human contact!!!!!!

"I don't know--I'm a brain scan from eighty years ago, I just woke up here and there's--nobody else here--how do I get to where you are?"

"You're...a scan? Are you sure? Where are you?"

"I'm in upsilon, at the controls for the geothermal plant. I remember getting my brain scanned in 2015 and then I was here." She just barely manages not to add, "Please help me, I'm so scared."

"Huh, sounds like the thermal plant controls." The woman pauses, and there's a crackle. "Can you hear me? I think we lost a relay. It'd be better if you can get to the comm room. You're...you think you're from 2015? What's your name?"

"I hear you now. My name's Margaret Peregrine. I know it sounds insane. I might be insane. Sorry. How do I get to the comm room?" If she turns out to have hallucinated the last several hours that would be the best news ever.

"Margaret, go upstairs, it's the room with the big dome." There's another crackle and a longer pause. "Damn, lost another relay. If you can get to the comm room, we can talk more there. It'll be okay, but I'm not sure how much longer..."

The signal hiss cuts out, and the line shows "No Signal".

She says, "Okay, I'll--I'll see you in a minute," uselessly to the dead console, pokes futilely at buttons until she admits that the signal isn't coming back, and finally turns around.

Upstairs. Comm room. Big dome. She can do this, because if she does it she will hear a human voice that is not dying. The vagueness of that "It'll be okay, but I'm not sure how much longer..." puts some urgency in her step as she starts looking for stairs going up.

Out the door, there's a large catwalk looking out over lower level, dominated by the top of a large shaft, which steams slightly. The room is alive with clanking and distant groans, but also the low thrum of machinery and a hum of electrical generators. Off to the right is a set of stairs leading up and hopefully to the comm room. However, the catwalk directly to them has collapsed where a massive tentacable exploded from the walls, and drapes down into the bowels of the shaft. In fact, about a third of the tubing leading down into the bore hole looks to be tentacables rather than ordinary pipes, some several inches in diameter. A small control console yields only the information that the facility is damaged, is currently producing 426 Megawatts, and was previously offline for 143 days, 11 hours, and 27 minutes. Following the catwalk down the left wall to try to find another way down to the floor and over to the stairs, she passes a sealed blast door to some kind of maintenance area, and then a T junction. Ahead, continuing forward, one of the maintenance tunnel doors gapes half-open. just above a ladder down to the floor. On the right, a catwalk continues across the room to a matching catwalk on the far side, but the center has fallen out.

She'll go down the ladder and set off clockwise, looking for a way back up to the set of catwalks that connect to the stairs.

Margaret starts to work her way down the ladder, but it breaks halfway down and drops her onto her butt. Stumbling to her feet, there's a noise from across the room--harder to see across now that she's down on the level of the large machinery and generator housings which divide it into a roughly figure-8 arrangements of aisles.

Well, crap. There had really better be another way up now. At least her body is pretty robust against falls. That short staircase with the big pipes at the top looks promising, what's over there?