A sign on the door says, "PACE Labs," and the lab number matches the instructions David Munshi gave her when he called yesterday to make sure she took the tracer fluid to improve the scan resolution, but a long pause brings no immediate answer to the knock.

Okay, time to lean against the wall and try to do the assigned reading and look both ways down the hallway every thirty seconds. Hopefully they're not going to reschedule and make her drink the tracer fluid again; it isn't going to win any culinary awards.

Thinking about the tracer fluid brings back the taste, still lingering vaguely hours latter--like chalk in milk. There's no answer for several minutes, and no motion in the waiting room, lit mainly from lights deeper in the lab.

Eventually she tries the door, just in case it's unlocked and she's supposed to go in and find someone, even though generally people don't want anyone wandering around their labs unaccompanied.

The door opens freely. Inside, the waiting room reception desk is covered with a myriad of notebooks, textbooks, papers in binders, and a takeout bag from what Margaret recognizes as a local sushi place. Another door, this one already propped open, leads deeper into the lab's office spaces. Someplace down the hall, the shadows from the brighter lights shift slightly with motion.

Well, probably they do want her to go find them then. She heads into the office spaces.

The hallway leads past a room with a sever cluster humming away and a work station, before back to the source of the primary labs, where an vaguely Indian-looking man is fiddling with controls in a room full of yet more servers. Pushing door startles him. He looks up confused for a moment. "Margaret Peregrine? Our 3:00?"

"Yeah, that's me."

"Excellent! Paul said he was surprised to get such an enthusiastic response to our study so quickly, PACE is letting us borrow some of their space and we're just getting set up. We're really excited about what we can do with modeling neural activity and opportunity to promote self-healing once we can reliably get a complete scan but...ah," he finally takes a breath and pauses. "You probably got that whole lecture at Paul's presentation."

Nod nod. "Say, uh, do you think I could get a copy of the scan afterwards? I know I don't have the software to do anything with it, I just think it would be neat."

"Oh yeah, sure!" Munshi says. "I, uh...might need you to pay for a couple spare hard-drives. Oh! Release forms--sorry, I got so busy getting the scanner booted up I lost track of time. Thanks for coming in on  a weekend, I appreciate it."

He grabs a stack of forms off a rolling cart with a laptop on it, plugged into the server racks. There's the usual medical stuff--name, biographical details, emergency contacts, allergies, plus what looks like a boiler-plate discussion of data usage protecting the right of the PACE team to make use of data resulting from the study.

Vital statistics, mom's name and phone number, not allergic to anything, and she reads over the data usage document carefully to see if it looks like they're planning anything weird. Probably they just want to do normal science and not, what would they even do, decode her memories and steal her bank account password? Figure out how to run it and act out the plot of The Matrix? 

The form provides few answers. It doesn't even necessarily appear to be all that specifically customized to the study.

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.

The lights appear to be signals for the locations of two cameras on a box, with the box mounted on a stick which vanishes down the neck. She tries for a few moments, and can get a view looking down the neck of the suit where there appears to be, dimly under some kind of black goo....possibly a human neck. Ick.

Shit. She's some sort of disgusting cyborg. This is the absolute worst. She feels like she ought to feel nauseous but she doesn't have that mechanism anymore (and given the givens, thank goodness for that). At least she's got this nice environment suit so she can't look at her gross horrible neck stump again on accident. Blech.

She tries washing her gloved hands in the sink; the ritual is a little comforting but not much. Now, what's in the break room? It had better not be another horrifying revelation.

The breakroom door is next to the same kind of comm panel from the Tech Depot, this one working and displaying a message "DATA BUFFER AVAILABLE". When she touches it, there's a vague falling sensation and then there's...playback in her head. Two people, one who sounds like a woman, the other who sounds like a man and might be named "Carl" though it's hard to tell with distortion at the start of the message, talk about "perma-sealing the facility" so that some kind of "they" can't get out, and setting it up so the rest of the facility can still draw power hopefully without having to come back. The pair talk about getting to a place called "Theta" safely after they leave.

Yikes, telepathy!

Okay, she's being an idiot; this time period can run brain scans on computer hardware in real time. So if it's not just emulating each of her neurons as a black box then she's a piece of software compatible with the other software around here and the ability to open files is impressive but not separately unexplained. Sweet, telepathy! She wonders if it works for real-time communications too.

She relistens to the message again from the beginning, since she was so distracted the first time, and is thoroughly creeped out about the possibility of having been sealed in here with entities that need to not get out. 

The breakroom holds few answers on entities which need to not get out, unless it's whatever came out of the open science-fiction-looking...refrigerator...thing? There's a large appliance of some kind with a snowflake on it, anyway, and some counters with a small box of curry mix, and another sink. Some people around here needed to eat at some point, anyway, so there's some real humans around, or were. The food appears to come matched with a small appliance labeled as a "Munchprint" which again sounds like Marketing was allowed to have input, but maybe to less of a worrying extent. It's like a Keurig for food printing? The boxes of food mix seem to fit into slots in the Munchprint, anyway. Beside a locker on the wall with the door, there's another one of those cable...things. This one is even larger, a good quarter meter in diameter, and where it reaches the wall it's dripping long, slow, trails of what looks like tar or used oil, which dribbles viscously into a puddle on the floor. The other part of the room holds a four-seat table, where three cups and a water bottle were left, apparently empty. A poster on one wall shows what looks for a moment like a mold stain over a pair of olive branches, before Margaret realizes the stain is just a green geometric print of some kind of complex facility in semi-transparent isometric view. It's not particularly picturesque, so why bother with such graphical fidelity? Another poster is prettier, a shot of some village on a sea coast or lake coast with docks, in a sunset. "Home is a state of mind," apparently. Looking around, she hopes the motivational poster helped with the minds of whoever lived here--it's a small touch in a fairly industrial setting.

Part of her hopes the humans are all escaped to somewhere less trashed and disgusting, but a much bigger part hopes that someone knows she's here. It seems pretty plausible that the facility on the poster is the one she's in; is it detailed enough that she can get her bearings?

The poster's not really intended as a map, it's an exterior view and doesn't really show corridors except where they wind between the various towers of the station or platform or wherever she is. Ironically, it's almost too detailed to be useful.

Well, that's stupid. Presumably everyone who was in here on purpose knew their way around and didn't need a map, but it's very inconvenient for her. 

She picks up the water bottle and cautiously pokes the dripping tentacable with it.

The cable surface gives slightly, in a way that doesn't look like plastic, more like half-cured tar. It might be made of the same stuff that's dripping out of it? It's grown around another panel on the wall, but when pulled away, the stuff that's dripped onto it from the leak doesn't seem to be doing anything. Margaret's having a hard time coming up with it other than gray goo...except it's black.

That's gross! But it didn't throw off electric arcs, or spring to life and attack her, or instantly corrode the water bottle into dust, or whatever, so it could definitely be worse. 

It looks like she's learned everything there is to learn from this room, at least for now; she moves on to the Machine Hangar.

The "pneumatic seal" on the hangar door is relatively easy to remove by twisting the handle, and once loose it falls right off the door--actually, given how easily it falls off when loose, she wonders how hard it was to hang properly? Anyway, once off, the access panel switches from red to green, and she's able to get into the hangar. It's disquieting almost immediately, though for not any reason she can put her finger on. Is it a gut feeling if it's not even your guts, and they might not even be guts anymore anyway? Anyway, just inside a doorway is a spot where more of the tentacables have burst out of a computer case and wormed into a wall. Some portions it are even glowing, little white-blue nodules of light on the dark cables. It'd almost be pretty, like Christmas lights, if they weren't so creepy, lighting up a poster of a large robot of some kind, apparently a "A-95 Worker" from Haimatsu. The name is vaguely familiar, Margaret recalls hearing it mentioned at robotics conferences back before the scan when she wasn't in this simulation, or this future, or whatever she's in. In the distance, there's a few dripping sounds, and the occasional minor groan of protesting metal, like a skyscraper in a hard storm.

Ahead are tables, with what look like fancy Remote Operated Vehicles opened up on them, surrounded by shelves, toolboxes, and diagnostic equipment. Another pair of the same type hang on the wall. The far one's camera-pod "head" has swung forward and up and it looks like it's covered with the same goo as the leaks in the walls, the tentacables wound like muscle, but looking too hard at it makes Margaret's vision--and everything else--staticky. A wall divides off the other half of the space, where the overhead rail spirals up to a high ceiling to hold another several robots, including two that look more like the A-95 poster. A large wall poster has another copy of the same logo from the breakroom, this time with more text: "Pathos II: Upsilon". One of the robots looks to be connected to the wall by a solidified mass of the black gunk, with a few small lights embedded in it, but it's not wound over with tentacables. If anything, it almost looks like it's passed out, it's head and arms sprawled out and down from the boxy main chassis. It doesn't make her vision go static. In fact, she almost feels something in the back of her brain that says she wants to touch it, pulling her in?

She stays well away from the area that makes everything go staticky even though she wants to know what's doing it--she has no idea what things can injure this body and there's no sign of anyone who might be able to help repair it, so she had better just avoid anything that does the cyborg equivalent of hurt.

Ooh, what's that collapsed robot with the lights on it, she wants to touch it--wait no why would she want to touch it, that cannot possibly be a good idea--aaaaaaa shit she's already touching it.

There's a voice, in her brain. No, not a voice, some kind of playback, the machine telepathy thing again? She can read the minds of some of the robots, apparently? There's a rattling speaker grill noise, then a human voice, which sounds like the same woman from the comms panel. She's asking the robot if it can talk "like the others". She gets no answer aside from the same rasping speaking static. Asking it "why are you like this?" brings the same answer. She offers it some "structure gel" and then tells the robot it's "creepy as hell" and that she's going to shut it down. The message goes dead halfway through her second time assuring it she's shutting it down. Margaret barely has time to wonder about why she did that before there's a loud banging sound from around the corner.

Oh cool more telepathy aaaaaaaaa she's hearing the memories of someone maybe dying OH FUCK what is that noise time to run the other way really fast and then hide in a corner and see if it happens again.

Margaret shelters in the corner further from the entrance to the spiral hangar area, and then there's an ominous crash from what sounds like the hallway outside, and then silence reigns again.

After a minute or two of waiting, Margaret goes back to see what the noise was. She's hoping for people, or at least for "not the roof caving in".

The noise appears to have been the second robot, the static one, waking up and walking out, and then slamming a hole through the door at the end of the atrium which was previously closed, and which is now cratered outwards revealing another section of the facility. Down the new hallway a short distance is visible, ending in a turn to the right. On the end wall, some kind of duct or maintenance tunnel gapes open, with tentacables trailing into it. The robot is nowhere to be seen.

Huh, the robots of the future are buggy too--plus ça change. She wonders if robotics programming has drawn on anything learned from brain scans. Hard to say, since that one wasn't acting particularly humanlike.

Also, what kind of bizzare constraints were the people who made this place operating under when they decided to have all the hallways folded up on themselves like this? 

She tries to get into the ductwork, because it's always so tempting to go into the ductwork and this time it really looks like she can get away with it, but with the diving suit on and the way the hatch is stuck shut she can't quite fit, so after taking a look around she backs out and goes around the turn into the new hallway.

The new hallways turns out to open into some large chamber--what a sign on the wall refers to as the "Robot Dock," apparently for the large airlock-looking hatch that the overhead rail leads to, though it also plays host to various other equipment in alcoves. A door on the far wall leads to the "Service Station". A fence with a locked gate almost divides the room in half, though it looks like there's an open portion at the far end by the door to the Service Station. 

What sort of equipment is it? Is any of it omnitools, or otherwise potentially useful? If nothing else it could be a useful clue to how much technology has changed since her previous set of memories.

None of the equipment looks like the hand-held Omnitool picture from the Service Console in the Tech Depot. The first pair seem like some kind of generator or material processing equipment, their function unlabeled and indistinct behind proper guarding and signage about high-voltage equipment. As she wanders around the corner, there's a loud banging, and the overhead flood lights in the Robot Dock shut off. Suddenly, from the Service Station door, there's a rattle and several crashes. The door, secured behind one of the four-armed pneumatic seals, slams several times with white glow visible where whatever it was is almost breaking through. After a few moments, whatever it was (presumably the robot?) gives up and moves on--there's another noise like it climbing back into the ducts.

Whoever programmed that robot (or whatever uploaded human is currently being it, she supposes) should reconsider their life choices. She heads into the Service Station once the coast seems to be clear.

Whatever damage the robot's failed attempt to get out of the Service Station did doesn't seem to have done the pneumatic seal any harm, it falls away just like the last one, and then the door slides open smoothly. The room beyond is a mess. One the back wall, there's some overgrowth of the black goo (structure gel?) complete with glowing bits. Shelves full of equipment have been knocked over and scattered as the robot made its way from the tunnel entrance on the left to the one on the right, both closed now and sealed over with some more of the gel that almost appears to be setting like a scab. In the center of the room, there's another leak of gel from the ceiling, this one apparently fresh as the puddle is small. Navigating carefully around it, Margaret strikes gold--some kind of maintenance workbench for Omnitools. There's a scattering of tools (apparently screwdrivers, torx screw sets, Allen wrenches, and battery drill/drivers haven't changed much), a poster of an Omnitool's internals, and a cabinet labeled OMNITOOL In the center of the work surface, apparently freshly repaired, is an Omnitool, a glossy trifold pamphlet introduction to the "Omnitool v2.5 Smart Access Computer", and a service manual. Apparently, they can use some kind of short-range signal to activate various doors and devices, or be jacked into various physical sockets both for extra processing power of an onboard "A.I." assistant loaded in an external Cortex Chip module this one currently lacks, or as a physical security token for accessing advanced functions. The controls are a little rudimentary, probably because according to the service manual the device is sealed for use in environments ranging from vacuum to a rather terrifying 400 atmospheres of pressure.

Finally, some good news! Margaret thinks when she gets to the omnitool bench. She immediately pockets an omnitool, and also a couple screwdrivers and an allen wrench just in case, then reads the manual cover to cover. The mention of the range of environments gets her wondering where exactly this facility is. Probably not in space, regardless of the suits and the mention of vacuum--the gravity is earthlike and the corridors don't curve the way you'd expect them to for spin gravity, and more importantly, who would build a space station with no windows? No, more likely she's underground somewhere. Or underwater, which would explain the airtight suits. And of course there's still the simulation option.

Once she's done with the manual, Margaret explores the rest of the room some more, looking for a toolbox or something she can use to carry the rest of the tools in, and also checks out the far wall. The structure gel or whatever it is reminds Margaret of early 21st century speculations about nanotechnology, both the rhapsodies about it's amazing potential and the mutterings about why it might be a bad idea.

Margaret hits paydirt early in her search for a carrying case--a cargo tote labeled with a "Carthage Industries" logo and several barcodes, apparently intended for shipping to PTH2UP. It turns out to be large enough to hold most of the tools from the desk, with some tetris work, though the spare battery for the drill driver doesn't fit, nor does the large grinder/sawz-all. With that loaded (and she'll have to find someplace to scrounge up a carry strap), she investigates the gel. She's apparently not the only person to have cause to regret the gel--deep within the mass is what looks like another suit like hers, headless and full of something that glistens unsettlingly and might be either more of the gel, or blood--it's hard to tell in the light.

NOPE nope nope nope nope she is taking her stolen tools legitimate salvage and going Somewhere Else. Like back to the room with the terminal that wanted an omnitool inserted into it, maybe.

The lights appear to be out everywhere in this section now, but back at the Tech Depot, the Omnitool slides into the on the Service Console like it was made for it. After a few seconds of "scanning omnitool" and some kind of clicking disk noise, a computer voice reads off, somewhat stiltedly, "Service Console Upsilon Three Including Pilot Seat activated". A menu pops up, presenting "System Status", "3progresS5scaN-MP", "Omnitool", and "Inventory". Checking System Status first shows the following:

2104/05/09
UPSILON#7185783
Run Setup...
WARNING: Remote Access Denied
WARNING: Servers offline
WARNING: Main power suspended
-> Initiate WAU setup A.41iu

...program unreliable...

...denied...
Emergency Systems: 13 days remaining...

The Inventory is the simplest, apparently just a tracker for the six "Haimatsu Ductile Suits" supposed to be stored here. Suit 3, hanging on the wall, apparently has an "unknown contaminant" but Suits 5 and 6 are "In Use". Apparently, all "Haimatsu Power Suits" are stored someplace called Omicron.

Under "Omnitool" is an entire sub-menu, allowing configuring a Tool Chip or Cortex Chip. It welcomes back user "Louise Meuron," and warns her Omnitool has neither chip, but a prompt allows her to unlock a tool box built into the console which holds a supply of Tool Chips, one of which is easy enough to load into the Omnitool. She's then able to flash on the latest security cyphers from the console's memory with an automated wizard (thankfully, as the user interface doesn't appear to be either Windows or a *NIX). There's also a worryingly casual training video for Field Service Operatives from one John Strohmier, Station Security Operative ("I have an office at Theta, come find me if you need any help") laying out that though Field Service Operative should have access everywhere, they don't given their Omnitool's restrictions to stop them from poking around places they shouldn't be such as research labs at "Omicron" unless they can find a way to work around them ("You're an engineer, for Christ's sake"). There's a brief flash of a diagram of the station, though badly distorted--apparently all the greek letters are different sections or zones. Apparently, with her Omnitool configured, Margaret now is equipped to go barging in all over the places. With her tool kit, she's even outfitted like a Field Service Technician.

The last section is the one with the strange name...which apparently turns out to be...well, her scan details:

theta:cache:legacy--DM_MP
unfold...
Sub.Margaret Peregrine
28xY Terminal Scan
Aut_DavidMunshi2015v1
Berkeley

Beyond that, the scan devolves into some more uninterpretable characters, something about "WAU" and unavailable and then completed operations. 

The controls for the "Pilot Seat" respond to her new Omnitool configuration, but none of the functions are accessible without somebody in it--apparently the seat is OFFLINE. There's a few reports, though, including one of "Wrangler" named Carl Semken getting shocked while using the seat to control a UH-3 vehicle to replace some heat shields causing a headache and nausea, then one later of other incidents (including to a "Gavin") of similar nature, eventually requiring "Prime Factor Jane Adams" to discontinue the use of the seats to require manual control or programming to be used instead, however slower it might be. So they...don't use these for scans, but instead some kind of tele-operation control?

The "13 days remaining" is pretty nerve-wracking but she knew this place was messed up. Also, wow, it's been 89 years. Her other self, the one who got up after the brain scan and went home, is probably either migrated to her own robot body or dead.

Being able to barge in everywhere sounds . . . pretty good at this point, actually, since if there's a way to fix this place or establish communications with somewhere that has people it could be anywhere. Also she gets the sense that the laboratory quarantine mentioned in the video is already a lost cause.

Seeing her own name in the files is unsettling without being surprising. She still doesn't understand why her mind in particular was here, or why she was woken up now. Maybe this place was doing neuroscience research? That could explain why her scan was in the facility's computers, but not why she would be woken up after everyone else was gone.

While Margaret ponders that, there's more ominous bangs and rattles, apparently the other robot is on the move again. Some are distant, then grow closer--there's a terrifying moment where a crashing rattle sends the gate on the hallway to the left of the Tech Depot slamming into the far wall as a spotlight sweeps against the wall, then it fades as the bot apparently turns and wanders off. There's one final-sounding hiss-slam of a door closing, and then silence for as long as it takes for Margaret to settle.

Margaret offers up a silent apology to all the people who were scared about autonomous cars. Being around something big and fast and controlled by unknown software is pretty scary, actually. Also, wow, all those people are also either immortal or dead. Her family and friends are either immortal or dead. What if she got married had kids and there are people out there who remember decades of her life that she doesn't? Whoever woke up a scan this old had better have had a good reason.

Eventually the runaway robot and the runaway existential vertigo both back off enough that she goes back to exploring for places she hasn't looked at yet.

There's one more corridor she has access to now, leading behind the Tech Depot and the Machine Hangar. The side corridor to the "Thermal Plant" terminates in a large, sealed door which even her Omnitool can't get working, but the newly opened hallway back to the Robot Dock shows three hatches--one large one for the robots in the Robot Dock, one smaller one that appears to be marked as an "external access," and then (down short corridor) one through a final hatch to the "Observation Tunnel" and "Observation Tower". Unlike the others, this one is active and invites her to scan her Omnitool to activate.

Observation Places are promising potential sources of context! Omnitool goes in the place and does the thing.

The door opens, and a short walk through stone reveals a glass corridor and the answer to whether she's in space, underground, or underwater. She's underwater, though apparently not too deep. Light filters down, diffused but fairly bright. Small barnacles and bivalves grow on the outside, and there's a little bit of moss on the inside, but someone has gone to effort to make it homey despite the industrial touches like a hatch in the floor. A table, chairs, and coffee cup indicate somebody liked to spend time here admiring the light and scenery outside--a nice change from the dark corridors of the facility she's seen so far, even without the dark emergency lighting. The table holds sketches of strange-looking fish, apparently somebody's art project. On the other side, she can see the outside of some of the access hatches, apparently...airlocks? Waterlocks? Whatever. Several large pipes parallel the tunnel across its length of a a hundred feet or so, one with bright blue letters UPSILON lightly overgrown with moss or kelp or something. On the same wall is one of the comm panels, again displaying a "DATA BUFFER AVAILABLE MESSAGE".

In the recording, a man (Carl? The voice is familiar from earlier, and his name was on the maintenance report) asks "Amy" if she's OK. She says she'll kind of miss the place as they head back to Theta. He assures her there will be plenty of time for watching the fish back at Theta, and he won't miss a power plant full of killer robots. Amy says that's cold, and it's not Theta's fault that it got "swarmed", and she'll sort of miss it after having worked there for years. Apparently, this one comes from around when the other was made.

At the end of the tunnel, after having examined all the (mostly corrupted) terminals and Amy's drawing station, the passage re-enters the rock on the other side of the underwater canyon. Up a flight of stairs, the passage to the "Observation Tower" is closed off, and Margaret has to turn to the right to "Security".

The view is pretty, but Margaret's not really capable of appreciating it as it deserves right now. All she can think about is how many miles of water are between her and civilization. And the implication that the buggy robot killed somebody isn't great either. Though at least, she thinks as she heads toward Security, it sounds like most of the people left in good order rather than dying.

(She keeps seeing that headless body buried in the gel. She hopes the kind of person she is now doesn't need to sleep.)

The next door's access button is red, even though the door stands open, and the case of the button itself has been cracked open by the pressure of more of the structure gel. Having failed to do the same with her prybar earlier, Margaret has a sense herself of the force involved in that. There's a steady drip of the gel from the ceiling, too. Walking near it, she's overcome for a moment, as a voice intrudes on her mind. A vaguely accented voice chatting in disjointed fragments about, "I don't understand" and "I just need to get back" and "What happened?" Her vision flickers disruptively as she walks past it. 

All this telepathy and no people anywhere. It's not great. She keeps moving, heading through the unshuttable door.

As she steps through the door and into the next room, Margaret's experience fuzzes harder, and then the lights go out and the door slams shut behind her. She's trapped, alone, in a tiny room. Dripping in the distance could be the pipe of this facility, or it could be the miles of water forcing itself down into the walls, like the gel, like the monsters. There's a duct access on the wall, but poking at the red access draws a spark of electric shock and pain. Prodding the door control from the other side to go back the way she came brings the same. More pain. Why can this body even hurt? Her vision goes more staticky, more blurred. The only thing really lighting the room is dim red emergency lights from behind the grates in the walls leading to more pipe shafts, and practically clawing at the wall brings no solution, and a large white pustule of whatever was on the walls.

This one looks different though, less misshapen, more like an even blob of garlic, except with a spot in the middle that glows gently. In fact, the more she looks at it, the more it looks...good. Inviting. Something in her makes her want to reach out...and before she can even question what part it was, she's sticking a finger of her suit body down into the gel thing. It draws a wave of the feeling of being in a magnet, and part of it opens up with an interior glow as she prods it, and then there's something like an electric shock, but one that feels good...and then she's able to stagger back. She feels fine. Actually, she feels better. The light on the thing has gone out, as have some of the other lights on bits of the gel growths elsewhere on the walls, and the light on the access to the duct is new a calm yellow.

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?

Over there turns out to be a door beside the base of the stairs leading up and out of the room...and a door through which clomps the giant robot from earlier. It waves its head around, as if surveying the scene, then starts slowly marching down on of the two main aisles. It doesn't seem like it noticed Margaret. Unlike before, when it seemed like it could move pretty fast if it wished, it's in no hurry now.

At least something around here is doing alright. Time to get out of this aisle and ideally into a corridor too narrow for Big & Stompy to wander down. Once the path is clear and she definitely isn't going to get run over she can head for the stairs.

It takes a long few minutes waiting, but she can move to keep the large equipment between her and the robot. Finally, it's moved clear enough she has a clear shot to the stairs.

Upward!

. . . and back downward to shut off the leaky steampipe threatening to scald anyone using the stairs.

Upward again!

The valve handle for the steam pipe breaks off in her hands as she carefully turns the valve closed the last bit, and the flashlight head of the robot sweeps over her direction at the noise.

Argh why is everything here falling-apart garbage and what does that imply about her body don't think about that.

Once she's confident she's somewhere she can't get run over she tries calling out "Can you hear me?" just in case Big Stompy has been able to talk this whole time. (It doesn't seem very likely. But. She's been wrong before.)

The monster doesn't seem to make anything that sounds like words, it just starts clanking in her direction, as if moving to cut her off from the stairs.

She chucks the broken-off valve handle the other way as a distraction and makes a mad dash for the stairs; by the time she realizes that was a stupid thing to do without knowing her body's top speed she's already committed.

The door in the ceiling slides open as she pulls the control handle for it, the monster clocking around someplace behind her--she's not sure if it's following her, or her attempt at a distraction, or its own agenda. She scrambles up the stairs, nearly ladder-steep, and pulls a matching handle at the top that sends the door sliding shut at her feet. She finds herself in some kind of landing--the stairs go up another level above her, but both doors on this level seem to have been locked out. Coming up stairs, lights flicker on and she finds herself in some kind of control station. On the wall, there's a map of the facility, above an area where it looks like at least one person has made a nest of pillows, a blanket, and a sketchbook:

http://tirsden.com/soma/upsilon-a_map_big.jpg

The access up to the communications tower is via another ladder, but this one's handle is resolutely unwilling to move, apparently locked out somehow. Through the open window frames in (apparently) Robot Assembly B, there's light and motion as a set of robotic arms come to life spasmodically. 

Margaret goes into Robot Assembly B and looks over the robot arms. Are these ones displaying any agency?

(She's not going to kill anyone else. She is not going to kill anyone else.)

The arms don't seem to be displaying any agency. On the other hand..."Amy, is that you?" a computerized voice calls from someplace down on the assembly line. "What happened to the pilot seat?" Some kind of robot is caught under material collapsed from the wall onto the assembly line.

Oh wow coherent language please don't die.

"I'm not Amy--can you understand me?"

The robot looks up at her, "What the hell happened to you? What's wrong with your...everything. You go diving in sewers or something?"

"I . . . actually I kind of don't know? I was like this when I got here--I mean, I got downloaded into this body and I don't know why. Listen, what's happened to this place? Where is everyone, why are there creepy cables everywhere, what's going on?" This all comes out in an increasingly hysterical rush.

"You're at Pathos-II, Upsilon. Don't you know who I am? I don't quite know what happened, I just woke up here after using the pilot seat over in the Tech Depot. The stuff almost looks like structure gel but...listen, can you give a guy a hand? It's not like I'm stuck down on the floor here or nothing." 

The robot is half-covered by a bundle of tentacables leading into a burst-open access panel in the wall, and it's held down by an "auxiliary power" cable as big around as Margaret's leg. Well, her old leg. She checks. About as big as this body's leg, too.

"So, you want me to pick up that cable on top of you and move it off of you, is that what you're asking?" This is probably a stupid question and she probably sounds like an absolute moron, but the LAST time she separated someone from the cable they were touching they DIED INSTANTLY so she wants to make absolutely 100% sure she is doing something correct and non-injurious and consensual.

"If you can't figure out how to help me out, I'm not sure I want you to move anything," the robot gestures with a claw-arm. "I'm obviously hurt, I'm not sure what's wrong with me, really. Look, if you see one of the other Wranglers around, tell them where I am, and get them to help. There's a lot of equipment and robots around here, and I think I'm stable for the moment. Don't need you getting hurt, too. Looks bad in the reports. Who are you, anyway?"

"Yeah, you look stable and I don't know anything about robot repair." She knew stuff in 2015, but you wouldn't ask the engineer of a nineteenth century steam train to help set up a new Linux install so you shouldn't ask her to do this. Even without the cable on top of him he looks awfully smashed up. "I'll try to get you help, but it might be a while--I'm not sure there's anyone left in Upsilon but the two of us." Because she murdered everyone else.

"We're alone here? What the hell happened? Who are you?...Look, I do know robot repair, but I'm no doctor. Can you get in touch with Lambda or Theta, see if they can send us one?"

"My name's Margaret Peregrine and I don't know how I got here, I woke up alone less than a day ago. There's someone in Theta but I need to get up the communications tower to talk to her. . . .  When you say you're not a doctor do you mean you know how to repair robots but not the kind you are?" Oh no, maybe "robot" is offensive and she ought to be calling him an upload or a droid or something.

"...What robot? I'm a human, like you. Look at my arms...," the robot waves its one claw again, then shakes its camera platform back and forth. "Look, you're new, you said? You got lucky on that, I didn't realize we got anyone new before...well. Just...call your orientation coordinator at Theta. Tell them Carl Semken's injured at Upsilon, and he needs them to send a doctor by the shuttle tubes, okay? They'll know better what to do."

Yes okay he's definitely human but he has . . . a robot . . . body? Whatever. She's not going to catch up on eighty years of good manners by interrogating a guy with a smashed chassis and his hydraulics sticking out all over the place, even if he can't feel pain that's got to be an absolute nightmare.

"Okay Carl. I'll get to Theta and I'll get you help as soon as I can." Margaret strides off in search of a way up the tower. She needs to override that locked stairway door, or find another way up that isn't locked.

Looking around, the first thing that strikes Margaret is the control console spread across the control station. A sticky note stuck to the terminal says, "Lockdown Procedure initiated, check terminal for details." Unfortunately, unlike the one in the thermal plant, this one wants a user access ID before letting her in--it displays a login screen that says, "Swipe card." The back wall behind the terminal is the locked door to the workshop and a giant mass of the black structure gel components bursting from the corner where the wall meets the ceiling. One of the bulb-shaped features sits among the other material, but for the moment Margaret doesn't feel drawn to it.

Carl might know where to get a card, but she doesn't even know if having one would help her get to the tower. Is there anything potentially useful in the workshop on the right?

There's one of the gel-encrusted robots slouched on the floor of the workshop as she walks in, wired into a wall hookup that says WAU. The assembly vibrates slowly, but with no sign of intelligence behind it.

What about the T-shaped hallway further on?

The hallway leads between a set of the vent hatches, and slumped at the base of one of the hatches is...a body. A human body, covered in blood. Too much blood to be alive. On the shirt pocket of the corpse is an ID badge: Carl Semken, 0722.

Aaaaaaaaaaa corpse aaaaaaaaa oh wait it's Carl and he's fine not fine but not actually dead, that's still incredibly gross, she is stealing his badge but only because it doesn't have much blood on it and she's wearing nice thick gloves (has she mentioned she loves this suit). Now to bring the badge back and see what she can learn from that computer.

The badge swipes on the reader built into the console, and reveals a menu. There's three options--an email system, a "power manager", and a staff list. On the staff list, it looks like most of the staff made it to Theta, but Amy Azzaro is apparently still at Upsilon Shuttle Station B.

In the messages, there's an unsent draft:


The power manager is less clear. there's six red icons.  "Thermal Chamber," "Const. Factory," and "Siphon" are all apparently "N/A", while "Comm Center," "Storage," and "Flow Control" are just "Off".

It looks like she might be able to power some more stuff on from here . . . but she should really move that cable off of Carl first, it didn't look properly insulated and neither did he.

Also, now that she's thinking about it, Carl might not know that his biological body is dead. He would have swapped out of it before it died, right, and if he hasn't been back there he might think he can swap back in. Maybe that's why he asked for a doctor rather than an engineer. 

And she's going to have to be the one to tell him. Crap.

She hesitantly makes her way back to Assembly B. "Carl? I have some bad news."

"Yeah, what now? Any luck getting ahold of Theta?"

"Not--not yet. Also I found your biological body and, and, it was super dead. I'm sorry."

"My biological bo...what? Come on, new girl, you got to wake up earlier in the morning to get that one past me. I'm right freaking here!" He waves a claw. "Look. Human hands. Human legs."

Okay either this is a very weird prank or someone here (probably Margaret?) is hallucinating wildly. (It sure would be great if all of this was a hallucination and she's about to wake up in Toronto.) She does not especially want to admit to any of this train of thought; she is supposed to be getting help like a responsible person.

"Um, anyway, I need to move that cable off of you; I'm going to be shunting power around and I don't want you to get electrocuted. Can--can you tell me right away if anything I do hurts or makes things worse?"

"Yeah, sure."

Margaret picks up a relatively undamaged bit of cable in her heavily insulated rubber hands and carefully, carefully lifts it clear and sets it down on the floor where it's not touching Carl or anything else important.

It takes some maneuvering to get the slack in the cable positioned right, but finally she's able to lift the cable off Carl. It comes loose easily enough, leaving behind a slick coating of the gel where it'd been resting on the robot carapace, and flops onto the floor.

And! Carl does not scream or die at any point in this process! 

Now she can go and try to turn on the things that are turned off and hope some of them are closed doors that will become openable.

Back on the console, trying to turn "on" the Comm. Center brings up a message that apparently there's insufficient power without either diverting power at a console in Assembly B or in "Flow Control". Tracking cables around, it looks like the auxiliary power cable which had fallen over Carl--who gives her a look and a "What the hell are you doing?" as she passes through--is the one she'd have to divert power through from Assembly B. She's able to open up the door to Flow Control, though, where a message on a similar divert handle says, "Read This! We strained the system. If you pull this lever, there's no turning back. Make sure you want it bad enough." Upstairs, there's a locker room with a set of more suits, like the one she's...in. One is missing, and there's a note on one of the lockers: 'Theta TURN AROUND. We sealed Upsilon to keep it working, don't fuck it up. A. Azzaro. Carl was not my fault." The actual airlock seems to be disabled, too--the door button into the lock chamber is inactive. Turning to head back down the stairs from the airlock area, there's a sign:

"Welcome to Upsilon! World's largest geothermal power plant. Gas refinery. Construct factory. Enjoy your stay!"

Carl is very reasonable in asking that! She is a very confused college student from the past and has absolutely no business messing around with any of this stuff. But it's not like she has any better options! So once she's sure what everything does, she pulls the lever to divert power through the no-longer-dangerously-draped cable.

"Are you lost?" Carl asks as she find her way to the power diversion control switch in Assembly B. As she flips it, the lights cut out and the spasmodically-moving robotic assembly arms freeze in place, though Carl's still lit by the lights on the glowing mass of structure gel anchoring him to the wall. "Ah!" Carl says, shocked. "Wha...what are you doing?" On the floor, clear of Carl, the gel layer on the cable sparks slightly.

"Oh no are you okay, is--is something wrong?" Oh no oh no she's hurt him somehow and she can't flip it back

"I'm fine...well, as fine as I can be stuck down here until you get a doctor for me, but you can't just go flipping switches like that. Somebody could get hurt. We're not all in suits, you know? Basic safety shit, didn't you go through orientation? Strohmier lecture you about just breaking into places with your omnitool if you feel like it enough and all?"

"No. I didn't. I didn't go through orientation, I don't have any memories of the last several decades, I don't even know where this facility is or how I got here. I don't know anything about anything and I'm just trying to get the door to the communications tower open so I can talk to the person in Theta and get us both help, I'm sorry I'm not--someone better, someone who knows things, but I'm all we've got. I'm sorry."

She wants to add that she'll do everything she can to get them both out alive, but it feels like an empty promise.

"I know it can feel like that, with everything happening up topside the last few weeks. Look, just go get on the comm to Theta, and see if you can get some help. You've got to focus on what you can do now, for yourself and for everyone left down here." Carl waves her out with a claw. 

Does he. Does he think she has impostor syndrome. No, she does not have impostor syndrome, she just is the biggest impostor who ever impersonated anyone. But if he's going to insist on believing in her she's going to do her level best to live up to that. She gets moving again, goes back to the door that her power-diversion was meant to open.

With the power diverted, the control console lets Margaret divert power to opening up the Comm Center door. Walking to the stairs up to the Comm Center, she's able to activate the lever for the big sliding (watertight?) door and move upstairs into, as promised, a room with a domed ceiling. Several large windows are set high in the metal dome, one trickling...more than is probably good for being underwater. Around the room are a few inert consoles, a few active consoles, and a large map of what looks like the Atlantic marked out with red string and pushpins. A few messages are printed out and also attached with pushpins. Reading through them, the picture gets grimmer.

She's on Earth. She's on Earth, underwater, and an asteroid hit and wiped out everything above the water. It said 05/09/2104 back on that console in the Tech Depot what feels like an hour ago...an asteroid hit the Earth 16 months ago, and she just woke up here now. On the other wall, there's a station that seems to offer a partial backup of some local site messages, and then there's what's clearly the main communications board which she could activate.

She already knew that everyone she knew was dead, but now--everyone is dead. If she had kids or grandkids, they're dead. Civilization is dead. This bizzare underwater facility is a significant chunk of humanity. She almost understands why someone would have woken her up here--just to have there be one more person in the world. No wonder Carl thought she was losing her mind from stress.

She activates the communications board and prays to the obvious lack of benevolent deities that she can get through to Lambda again.

The main comm panel lights up, but initially only with a single message: "LUMAR Link Broken, Manual Connection Required". Down at the keyboard, a smaller panel lights up with what looks like a directory.

Are those . . . ping times? No, wait, they're depths. And Tau and Phi look like they're off the continental shelf, wow. Did these get built after everyone knew there was an asteroid coming, or were they already there? Never mind. She needs to get herself and Carl out of here before the leaky roof caves in and possibly crushes her to death and definitely floods everything. She dials Lambda.

It takes a moment of working with the controls, there's some kind of...gain or something which has to be adjusted, but finally the link connects. It lights up with "LAMBDA" and a static picture of a black-haired woman. "Ah, that's better. Margaret, was it?"

"That's me! I got to the tower. What's your name? Also I found someone else, Carl, but he's in a robot attached to the wall and he's injured, do you know how to get him out of here too?"

"Hi Margaret, I'm Catherine. Have you figured out what's going...wait, you said there's somebody else there, in a robot? Somebody from the staff? Is there anyone else over there?"

She considers, for about half a second, telling the full truth.

"Yeah, Carl Semken--he's stuck in one of the robots in assembly B, his human body is dead, I found the corpse. There--there's nobody else here as far as I know but I haven't been everywhere."

"Does...he know? Are you sure it's really all of Carl? What does he remember?" Catherine sounds shaken. "Last I heard, Upsilon was full of crazy robots attacking people."

"Uh, he was insisting he still had a human body but I don't know if he was messing with me or what? Nobody's been, uh, nobody's attacked us, there's one big robot wandering around all over but it doesn't seem hostile, just big and, um, stupid."

"Huh." Catherine sounds puzzled, and seems to turn that over for a second. "I think he might be just...having trouble processing what's going on. You said you're from, what, 2015? Like, you're a scan? How'd you get to Pathos-II? What are you running on?"

"I don't know how I got here; there was no-one there when I woke up. I'm, in a diving suit and I, um, don't super understand what's going on inside it, hardware-wise, some kind of cyborg setup." Maybe in the 22nd century it's totally normal to be gross and disgusting and not have most of your head.

Before Catherine can respond, there's an ominous groan from the leaky roof above, and the trickle turns into a steadier flow, increasing by the heartbeat.

Oh crap okay conversation back on important topics right now. "The roof is collapsing--how do I get to you?" 

While she's waiting for an answer she runs back to the staircase and slams the watertight door shut. If there's another way out of here she can leave it closed and not dump literal tons of water on Carl.

The watertight door slams shut below her, covering over the staircase before more than a few liters overflow the rim of the stairwell. Over the comes, Catherine sounds upset. "Lambda. Come to Lambda, I'll be waiting for you here. Take the Shuttle, or a Zeppelin if you can find..."

The conversation is lost in a fizzle of static as a giant section of the ceiling, what must be a pressure dome, caves in with a torrent of water. The room fills around here, and the wave slams Margaret against the wall. For a moment, she blacks out, then comes to again face-down in a curl on the floor. The comm station is completely filled, lit by the gentle, pervasive glow of light percolating down from the surface. The door in the floor seems to be sealed and...well, at least it's hard to see how it could get worse for the moment.

This is fine. She's fine. She's not going to run out of air and die because she hasn't been breathing. There is really no need to panic. 

She panics anyway.

It turns out that not needing to breathe, not having a heart that can pound in your ears, is pretty good for making it easier to stop panicking. She's okay. The communications console is dead but she's not sure she'd be comprehensible underwater anyway. She wishes Catherine had had time to say where the exit from Upsilon was. Is there a way out of this tower without opening the watertight door? . . . Actually possibly she should try swimming up through the hole in the roof and looking for the shuttle from the outside, if this diving suit isn't too heavy to swim.

Trying to jump and waving her arms proves the diving suit is too heavy to swim, apparently weighted to keep it on the bottom. However, the area where the ceiling fell in leaves a lip that's in reach of where she can reach, and with a jump, she's able to grab the ledge and start pulling herself up. Pulling this body up, anyway.

Huh, apparently this body has enough upper body strength to do a pullup. That's kind of neat. Also she has no idea how exercise or indeed any other aspect of metabolism works for her now and that's so far from the point, seriously pull yourself together Margaret. Got to find a shuttle. Is there anything on this facility that looks like a shuttle port? She's high enough up that she should have a really good vantage point if visibility isn't completely awful.

The dome is part of a canyon, apparently. There's some kind of pipeline above her, and crossing under it there's a metal platform off to the left that looks to say, "Zepplin Transport" but doesn't seem to have any signs of any actual zeppelins. Over to the right, among the coral and other sea life growing on the wall, is an airlock exterior door, but it doesn't seem to want to let her in--it must be the other side of the broken one from earlier in this part of Upsilon. A red light glows off in the distance around the corner, and following it reveals it to be on top of a lightpole, stuck into the seabed next to a pipeline running through the canyon. The lights turn on as she approaches, bring clarity to a small zone of the murky twilight around the base. Down the length of the pipeline, there's another one of the high-level red lights, and following it reveals a second light post in turn. As it turns on, the one behind her turns off--apparently, they're proximity-triggered. At the base of the third, there's a communications panel, like the first place she had the machine telepathy at Upsilon, again displaying the "Data Buffer Available" message.

Okay, sure, she'll download unfamiliar files into her brain like a clueless grandmother installing malware toolbars on her Windows XP box. Maybe it will tell her where the pipeline goes, since the people who built this place quite reasonably didn't think to label the outsides as comprehensively as the insides.

On the call recording, a very upset Amy Azarro talks to somebody name Strasky. She sounds furious, still processing Carl's death--apparently a robot killed him right in front of her--but Peter wants to know if the station's power plant was configured properly before she got out. After losing her cool and cursing him out, she finally confirms this, and that she's headed to the Shuttle station, and Peter says they're all rooting for her.

Maybe if she had any clue how and why these things got recorded she would know whether the mention of Amy going to the Shuttle station was a good sign for her being close to it. If she follows the pipeline to where it joins up with Upsilon is there any sign of a shuttle station?

Down the way a little further, there's a robot floating in the water, a red light illuminating the other way. It's...muttering to itself? "What I wouldn't do for some gel. I just...I need some gel."

Margaret doesn't know what kind of gel they mean, but if it's the kind that's all over everything inside then, uh, they're in luck. She tries talking, since she can understand them alright, and accompanies it with a gesture at the buildings: "There's lots of gel inside Upsilon but I don't know how to get back in from here."

It turns to her, and starts floating closer, slowly but determined. "Look, don't be greedy. Just a sip, you've got so much."

"Eheheheheh nope" oh huh in the absence of breath she will apparently do a verbal nervous giggle but that's not the point the point is robot vampire. She backs away slowly and then somewhat less slowly and then gives up trying to go backwards in a diving suit underwater and turns around and skedaddles.

The robot appears slow--apparently, legs outrun...propeller things. Further down the way, there's a smaller, nearly-spherical robot stuck under a small rockfall. It beeps plaintively as she walks close by.

"Do you speak English and aren't a vampire?"

"Beep bepp." The robot flickers its single white "headlight" eye. Apparently, the answer to at least one of the questions is no.

She digs the sphere out of the rockfall, and then promptly backs up a bit in case "Beep bepp" is Robot for "I am definitely a vampire."

Apparently it's not, because it just goes, "Beep beep" and swirls around the area a bit on a pulse jet hidden behind a grated cover, and then takes up a position behind her shoulder as if saying, "Well, I'm following you."

Oh dear, another entity that thinks she knows what she's doing. Or she's anthropomorphizing wildly--those beeps didn't sound particularly linguistic--but she still doesn't have any kind of systematic model of what kinds of minds go in what kinds of bodies. Whatever. Onward to places that might be a shuttle station, with her new friend along if that's what's happening.

Another few turns take her through what looks like an oil field. Pumping rigs rise out of the sea bed and are linked to the main pipeline at intervals. Actually, that one sign did say it was a natural gas refinery, so maybe it basically is an oil field. Finally, though, she comes to another collection of buildings, concrete foundations and metal pressure hulls rising from the rocky sea bed, some embedded, others supported off the sea floor. An airlock is at...ground level, with a sign that says, "Upsilon Station B: Shuttle Station". It looks like it's over-grown with little sea life, and initially doesn't respond to the button just like the one she left next to outside the comm station, but the little droid seems to know what it's doing--it lights up a torch and starts burning them off in a circle around the door ring.

Oh gosh, that's so helpful! Margaret joins in with the tools she's been carrying around, prying and scraping and cutting until the door is clear.

Between the two of them, the job is done in a few minutes. Apparently, the robot considers its job down as it sweeps the circle clear, as it turns and jets off up into the dark of the shallower water where Margaret's diving suit can't rise to follow. it's not clear where it's going, but the "OPEN" button on the airlock allows it to swing open. Inside, the airlock is similarly overgrown, but a light above a panel that says "SWIPE OMNITOOL" seems to be working.

Margaret waves goodbye to the helpful sphere and swipes her omnitool on the panel.

At the swipe, the airlock control flashes to PROCESSING, and the pumps and equipment comes to life. The outer door swings closed again, and with a slight klaxon sound, the water starts pumping down into a grating at the bottom. She can look up and watch the water level coming down above here, then it's over her mask, and then below her neck. As soon as the waterline passes, the klaxon proves it wasn't quiet, just muffled. Now it's really loud. After another few seconds, the last of the water swirls down the grating in the floor, and the klaxon cuts off as the inner door slides open with the sound of a locking bolt releasing. She's made it to the Shuttle station.

Margaret is not sure why pumping out an airlock is dangerous enough to justify that much klaxon but presumably someone who knew a lot about it thought it was. Now, does this shuttle station have a shuttle in it, and ideally also a route map?

As Margaret steps across the threshold, a flashlight snaps on on her helmet. It looks from its beam like the tunnel leads down a small distance onto an island platform between two tracks, each hosting a small shuttle car, about the size of an airport tram. The lighting is dim, and someplace in the background there's the omnipresent drip of water.

Automatic headlight: cool. Automatic headlight that somehow failed to turn on until just now: less cool, but maybe getting water dumped on it jostled something back into place.

Now, does it make more sense to try to turn on the shuttle cars or to just walk along the tracks? She doesn't seem to have gotten any more tired since waking up, but it's been less than a day and it could be hundreds of kilometres to Lambda for all she knows. Probably somewhat less, since the whole complex was one pin on the big map, but it's still worth trying to get train service for a bit before giving up and walking. So it's time for another round of "follow cables back and forth looking for the on switch".

At the far end of the platform, where the shuttle tracks vanish into tubes in the wall, trying to hop the platform-edge fence shows that just down the tunnel, there's some kind of automated doors sealed over the tunnel--maybe they're subdivided, to stop water from flooding back along the tunnels if part of the system floods? There's a control box for track power, but the little screen built into it shows "insufficient power", so indeed following the cables seems to be the order of the day. However, looking back towards the right-side platform, there's a communications panel on the wall showing a buffered message, and an open door leading to some tracks back the way Margaret arrived from, to the side of the tunnel down from the surface airlock she used.

Buffered message get. Is it weird that she's getting used to this? Probably everyone is used to this and it's not any weirder than getting used to, like, smartphones.

The call quality was awful, but it sounds like Amy made it here, and ran into the same problem Margaret has with track power being off. She was worried if the power wasn't stabilized, the train could cut out halfway to Theta. It sounds like she meant to go fix the power, maybe why the door is open.

That might have been the first one of these to be immediately practically useful. Margaret follows in Amy's presumable footsteps, hoping her apparent failure doesn't mean she died on the way.

The tunnel leads back a distance long enough to hold more than a few trains--apparently it goes to some kind of maintenance facility. The whole place looks like it could use maintenance--some of the cables hang down and spark, and there's breaks in the casing of the power rails along the walls that the shuttles look like they ride. Just before a closed end door, a small set of steps lead up to a door off on the left side. From around the corner as Margaret gets close enough to see the light spilling out the door into the tunnel in front of her, she can hear a hissing sounds--hissphiss. Hissphiss. Hissphiss.

She tucks cables back into their overhead racks where she can do so safely but she can't do anything about the rail casings. When she sees the light and hears the hissing she approaches cautiously, expecting another leaky steam pipe.

It's not a steam pipe, more of a pumping noise. Rounding the corner...there's a woman lying motionless on a pile of the structure gel. A pair of cables lead from a power box into some kind of gel structure on the wall, which is pumping like a bellows and making the noise. It's connected by a disturbing nest of tubing and cables to different spots on the woman's body. It takes a moment to realize the woman's turned her eyes and is blinking at Margaret. "Don't hurt me!" she cries out weakly.

NOPE NOPE NOPE this is NOT what she wanted

Margaret can't bring herself to make eye contact; she talks to the opposite wall. "I'm not going to hurt you. What do you need? Can I help? What happened to you?"

"I...fell, working on the power relays," the woman--Amy?--gasps. "This thing...it saved me and wouldn't let me die, but it can't let me go. I've been here...I don't know how long."

"I don't know--what to do--even if I could get you out, there's no food here . . . "

"If you see Masters or Holland, tell them I need help," she gasps. "Tell them Amy needs help."

"Okay. I'll. I'll tell them." Why is a misplaced college student murderer suddenly the only hope for way too many people (okay, two people, but that's still way too many).

She keeps walking, heading off to finish the job Amy started.

The power board is right next to Amy in the maintenance room. There's two cables from Amy's...involuntary life support into two ports on the electrical box on the wall, which is recessed into the power lines to the track guides. The screen on it is flickering, but displays "insufficient power--drain detected--systems offline."

Fuck. Not this again, this shouldn't have happened once, why is it happening again, why?

(I need those . . . I was okay)

At least this time she can just walk to Lambda. 

She should probably go back and ask Amy how far it is, before she sets out.

She doesn't want to talk to Amy. Honestly she doesn't want to look at Amy. Or think about Amy. 

(Why did you do that? I was okay . . .)

But if she dies on the way to Lambda because she didn't get some important piece of information, she and Amy and Carl are all doomed.

She walks back to Amy and stares at the floor again. "I can't turn on the shuttles. I'm going to try to walk to Lambda and get help; I know there's someone there. Do you know how far it is, or which track to take?"

Amy manages a few words per breath. "Either track...goes to...Lambda. Three...klicks...or so. Never make it....outside, mountain's in the way...have to climb it. No way...a ductile suit...lasts that. Might be able...to override...tube doors? Jimmy...proxies...like a train."

'Inside the train tube, trick the doors into thinking there's a train there to get in and out. Got it. Thank you. Um, hang in there? It's going to be okay?" She has heard less convincing assertions but mostly in YouTube comments.

"You too. I wish...I was home," Amy gasps. "Tell Theta I'm here."

"I will."

Margaret turns away and goes back to the shuttle station, climbs over a fence to get down to the tracks, and starts walking. Three klicks isn't far; even in the suit it shouldn't take much longer than an hour, maybe two.

Without the track power on, the track bed forward to Lambda out of the station is dimly lit and faintly damp, like the track through the slightly-propped door back to the maintenance workshop and power controls where Amy is attached to...whatever the gel it is that's keeping her alive. That has been keeping her alive for...possibly a year if Margaret's doing the math right. It looks like there's some kind of main rail along the base, with guides along the walls containing power and data. It looks like the motor for the door out of the station pulls it sideways into the left side of the tunnel once it's triggered, but the one blocking the path to Lambda is a big chunk of metal for the moment. There's some kind of door at the Lambda end of the platform, too, next to where the power switch would be active, if not for Amy's life support drawing straight from the source back in the maintenance tunnels beyond the half-open other track door.

Margaret looks at the door. It looks heavy, but not so heavy that she couldn't drag it out of the way if it was unlatched. Unfortunately all the components involved in latching it are hidden by the fact that it's shut.

On the other hand, the door to the workshop Amy's in is open, and it looks a lot like this one. In fact, Amy would have had to hack it if the power was in its current state when she came in there. If she goes and checks out that door she might be able to repeat the process on this door, and then presumably again at the far end of the tunnel.

Margaret investigates the door to the maintenance tunnel, at the end of which is the workroom where Amy is stuck. A panel on the conduit running along the tunnel wall just before the door has indeed been pried open, and there's what look like a couple loose wires cut out pulled loose. It looks like they'd patch into the multimeter leads built into the Omnitool (which, as a tool issued to field technicians, conveniently has a multimeter built in). Checking the door into the tunnel forward shows the same panel and behind it is a roughly similar layout of wires.

Margaret hooks up the leads. Fortunately the conventions of which wire is which don't seem to have changed much in the last century.

Once the right wires are clipped, stripped, and hooked up, there's a barely audible "clack" deep in the door.

Draaaaaag the door open?

The door sticks, but once Margaret gets a prybar on it, it starts sliding slowly open. Beyond is a dark tunnel, which winds slightly as it vanishes into the distance beyond Margaret's light.

Once more unto the breach, then.

It's pitch dark down here, not ordinary darkness but the cave-darkness that no eye or camera can adjust to. After the second time she trips on something she turns on her flashlight despite having no idea how much battery it has.

The tunnel leads on into the dark for minutes, the light from her flashlight really only picking out a tiny cone of light inside the darkness. She's not sure how far she's gone so far, only that it's quiet and dark, her steps and a distant dripping the only sounds. After a while, what could be ten or fifteen minutes, the walls change as the tunnels seem to be sloping down. Now, there's occasional spots of what look like corrosion or maybe mold on parts of the walls, the rails, and even the power conduits. After a while further, it starts looking like there could even be cracks in the case of the tunnel walls. Finally, she comes to another one of the doors, sealed across the tunnel.

She's on the other side of the door this time, so it's less clear which panel is hiding the wires she needs to get at. Fortunately, there's nothing stopping her from prying off panels until she finds the one she wants.

It takes a little more checking--it turns out this time, the same sensor overrides are hiding in the other wall rail, but finally the door *clicks* and can be persuaded to open.

Great. She leaves the ripped-off panels on the floor and heads into presumably-Lambda.

Beyond the door is...more tunnel. It's different than the one behind her, though whether for better or worse is hard to say. There's a few flickering emergency lights in this section, which is a supplement to Margaret's light, but the walls seem to be in noticeably worse shape. As the tunnel slopes down and to the right, there's a puddle ahead that quickly grows to fill the full width of the tunnel, even if it looks to be only about ten inches deep. Someplace ahead, around the curve of the tunnel, there's an echoing electronic ringing noise.

Down here a puddle could go from ten inches deep to who knows how many meters in a moment. She shuffles forward into it, not putting her weight on a foot until she knows there's solid floor underneath.

It looks like there is indeed solid floor, especially sticking to the edges. She splashes across the several meters of water. The emergency lighting ripples over the surface of the disturbed water, and in the distance the electronic beeping ring continues.

She tries to follow the beeping to its source, inasmuch as that's possible in the echoing space.

Fortunately, there's also a light once she rounds a slight corner--there's a comm panel on the wall, ringing away in the dark. Apparently the emergency power in this section extends to the intercomm--maybe this half of the tunnel is powered from Lambda for emergency power?

Maybe it's Catherine! Margaret runs to the comm panel and looks for the button to pick up.

There's a marked button for "TALK". When pressed, there's a crackle as the call connects. "Mar...Margaret, are you there?"

"Yes! Catherine, is that you? I'm in the shuttle tunnel!"

"Are you all right? The system says the power's in emergency backup, and warning about potential hull breaches and flooding in that section."

"There's definitely water but it isn't rising much. Where in Lambda are you?"

"I'm up in the laboratories, but the system's warning there may be structural problems in the shuttle station. You might need to come around outside."

"Okay. Is there an airlock somewhere I can come back in?" 

"Yeah, there will be. Just look for the maintenance hatch for your section, there should be a way from there to the Lambda pressure lock."

"Okay. Um--I found Amy. She's--trapped--in the shuttle station on the other end. I told her I would try to get help."

"Amy? Amy...Azzaro? She's alive?"

Yeah, but she's--she's sort of. Stuck in a blob of gel? Apparently it's been keeping her alive but I don't know how to get her out safely and IreallyhopeyoudoandI'mscared. Sorry."

"It'll be OK. Just get to Lambda, I'll be...hang on, what's tha..." The line goes dead, and the screen's "ready" display goes to black.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Margaret pokes despairingly at the screen a few times, but the problem is clearly on the other end. Then she gets moving down the hall again, looking for the airlock out, desperately hoping Catherine will still be alive in the laboratories when she gets there.

The maintenance hatch in the wall isn't too much further. Behind it is a short tunnel, and a ladder up into a pressure lock, this one with its doors in the floor and ceiling. With a swipe of the Omnitool on the scanner, the lock starts to cycle, filling up with water and then the upper hatch lowering and a ladder lowering down. It leads up and out of a hole in the seabed. There's a few lights visible in the distance, a few tens of meters away in the murky water.

If she heads for the lights and they turn out not to be what she wants she might lose the way back to here. On the other hand, there's no wall she can follow to get there and nothing here that she wants. She makes as sure of a mental note as she can of the ground around here and her bearing, and heads for the lights.

The lights here don't initially seem to be as much of a path as between the sections near Upsilon. Instead of being on poles, they're just...stuck to equipment projecting out of the sea bed. Hopefully they lead to Lambda? How big can this ocean be, anyway? Finally, after walking through the dark murky water for minutes from one random-looking installation to another, some overgrown with barnacles or coral, there starts being a path that looks a bit more finished. Signs on some of the installations start counting down the distance to Lambda, starting from 350 meters, then 300m at the next one, then 275m. However, before the path reaches the station, the next bend reveals the red light of one of the larger robot units drifting out around one side of what looks like a split in the path. As it turns, there's the now-familiar magnetic-interference sensation in her head. "Finally," it says. "I've been waiting for this." It starts drifting closer.

"Hello!" Is this Catherine? No, the voice is all wrong. "What's your name? Mine's Margaret."

"Are you ready? Need to let some of that black blood out." The robot drifts forward, one of their claws raised menacingly.

"What--no--what is wrong with you?!" Margaret doesn't stick around to hear the answer. She darts sideways, aiming to get a nearby boulder between her and them.

Putting the boulder between her and the robot reveals that the path rejoins past it, even as the robot whirrs its way around from the side she just left behind. "Come on, you have so much..."

She keeps moving, her gaze flicking between the next marker and the seabed in front of her.

You're no better, say her thoughts. You will also drain the life from someone else to save yourself.

She keeps moving.

The robot is quickly left behind in her wake, unlike the guilt. Somewhere in the water disconcertingly far above, she catches the silhouette for a moment of a hammerhead shark. The path winds between more structures, finally starting to look like buildings, windows and all, sticking out of the seabed instead of just equipment. However, there's also debris, fragment of girders and tubing scattered like sticks across the seabed, some as big as this body's arms. Winding her way between them, she finally finds an airlock door, marked "LAMBDA." In front of it is a small submersible, lying off kilter lying on the seafloor like a toy tossed by a bored giant. The door opens when she tries it, possibly because it was already loose--the inside is slightly overgrown with moss and sea life. In spite of that and the pressure, the computer seems intact. It turns on to when she sticks her omnitool down into the cradle for it, but the sub's the onboard computer doesn't like something about how her omnitool is configured. "Unable to activate escape vessel--protocol missing," the omnitool Helper Jane voice says, and the screen displays "No Cortex Chip Found."

A shark disconcertingly far above is better than a shark disconcertingly nearby. 

She cannot provide a cortex chip, but neither does she actually want to do much with the submersible right now; she wants to find Catherine. If Catherine hasn't gone the way of the scattered hardware. Into the airlock she goes.

The pressure lock works, at least, and admits her into another degraded-looking interior. Off to the right, she can just barely catch sight of a suit storage/dressing room like the one she awoke in, but with no chair, before there's a moan from deeper in the station and a wave of the magnetic-feeling disorientation. "Stay back!" cries a familiar voice. Catherine! There's another moan, and then Catherine cries out as another wave of disorientation sweeps over Margaret.

Rough layout (entry from the top left):

"Gaaaah, what is this? Catherine? Are you okay?" Margaret asks as she stumbles back a step. 

"Margaret?" Catherine calls. "Hide, be quiet. Don't draw its attention."

Margaret gets into the nearest concealed space, or failing that gets her back against the nearest wall, and tries to look uninteresting. She's terrified but she doesn't feel terrified, she can't hear her own racing heart or feel her limbs ready to move at top speed. It's like she's half terrified and half doesn't exist.

Margaret pulls herself against a wall in the dive prep room in a gap between a set of lockers and some piled up totes. As she does, she catches just a glimpse of a fast-moving humanoid shape down the corridor, fortunately not coming her way. There's a few clanks and rattles, but after a few minutes, Catherine's voice comes back down the hall, quietly. "I think it's gone. You should be safe to come here now."

Margaret emerges slowly and with a minimum of noise and heads towards Catherine's voice.

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."

"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?"

"Not really unconscious, I think. More just...nonexistent. I didn't feel anything between the robot body and the omnitool, the time just didn't exist. Just...remember to plug me back in, okay?"

"Of course." She doesn't seem to have the instinct to shiver, she notes, because she would have at the thought of being that vulnerable. Unable to move, never knowing when she was turned off whether she would wake up again. At least it's better than being Carl or Amy. At least there's something she can do to help.

"Before we go I should look through the rest of this area for anything useful, so we can go straight on to Theta if we can get the sub working. Can you hear me from anywhere in this area?"

"Yeah, the intercom microphones let me hear a lot," Catherine says.

"Oh good; I'll tell you if I spot anything useful." Off she goes to explore all the parts of Lambda she can get to from here with no omnitool.

The facility is cut off by debris, possibly from whenever the "tower" collapsed, but there's a dormitory/lounge area and a storage room Margaret can reach. The dorms look like they were occupied, cleared out partially, and then re-occupied with only a few beds taken. There's scatterings of personal possessions from the earlier group, but it seems like the second group were travelling light and with a goal--there's a diagram on one wall discussing equipment as "take," "leave," or "repair in place". From the look of it, things weren't nearly as bad off at the station when whoever made the list started making it. Tasks from a half-erased list are broken down by person, including "Reed," "Hart," "Golanski," "Rogers," "Holland," "Davis," "Fisher," and "Cronstedt". Other things are heart-breaking reminders of the world she's in, like a printed email which looks to have been taped inside a locker by some of the early crew, and left behind:

Another Munchprint is set up in the corner, and Margaret finds herself staring at it for a while with a dull sense that maybe it should be making her feel hungry. She's not even clear what it would mean to feel hungry in this body, or low on power, or whatever--a thought she's startled out of when what looks like the robot from outside in the water earlier slams into the glass window beside her facing out to sea. A couple cracks spread across it as the electronic interference feeling stabs into her brain, and then it lines up and tries again. There's more cracks this time, and then it tries a third times...and just when there's enough cracks Margaret might wonder about the window integrity, it appears to give up and motors away in a stream of bubbles.

Okay, so being visible from the windows for a long time is not a good idea, got it. Also she should really figure out how often she needs to do her (way, way worse and less pleasant) equivalent of eating. But first she should get to the storage room, because if anywhere is likely to have a good ratio of useful tools to unbearably sad emails it'd be there.

The storage room turns out to be heavy on mysterious electronics gear, cable spools, and Munchprint-branded shelf-stable canisters, and shy on much else...other than a large one of the bulb-shaped gel structures.

Margaret catches herself staring at the bulb, and then realizes she's feeling . . . not exactly hungry or tired or anything else she has a word for, but there's some way in which existing in her body is less pleasant than it was earlier.

She vaccilates an embarrassingly long time, and then she sticks her arm in the bulb and tries not to think about the fact that she'll never get to have chocolate or strawberries or pancakes with maple syrup ever again.

The bulb closes over her hand up to the wrist. Knowing what she's in for this time, she can almost feel waves in the bulb answered by waves of gel in the suit, and then her arm is a shooting but...bizarrely pleasant pins-and-needles sensation as her every sense begins to by washed by electromagnetic energy in time with the pulses. Everything in her vision goes brighter for a moment and her perception of the room around her almost overwhelms her before settling down to feeling remarkably energetic, like she just finished a good meal, as the bulb almost forces her hand out as it closes. As she staggers back ,the lights on the gel around the bulb have gone out, along with the room lights in that corner of the storage closet. Someplace far off, there's a clanking thud and a moan.

"Whatever you just did, Margaret, I think that brute's back. Watch out!"

"Oh crap." She yanks her hand out of the bulb and starts moving back toward the lab, prioritizing speed but also stealth--she doesn't know if the robot can track her by sound but does know she can't afford to let it/them get between her and Catherine. Fortunately she has a significant head start, and can move from one bit of cover to the next until she gets back to the lab.

"Sorry, Catherine, but I think we need to get out of here," she says as she scoops the broken omnitool into the repair kit and moves to disconnect the working one. "I'll see you in the sub."

"Be carefu..." Catherine says as her omnitool comes loose from the dock.

Margaret whispers "I will" even though that's extremely stupid, shoves Catherine into her securest available pocket, and makes a run for the exit. If the robot follows her out she really doubts the sub will be improved by a pounding, so better hope she's the only one here who can operate an airlock.

Sprinting to the airlock, Margaret can hear something in the hallway behind her. It doesn't sound robotic, unlike her pounding footsteps. Swiping the Omnitool at the door causes the door to start closing--too slowly, faster, faster...and for a moment at the end of the hallway behind her through the closing door she can see a shape, looking humanoid but almost completely covered in the gel and glowing structures, as she gets hit by a wave of the electromagnetic static. By the time she shakes it off, the water is already rising above her knees. The dull hush of the water fills the chamber and then the outer door opens.

Walking away from Lambda to the minisub parked outside, there's no sign of the...beast? Brute? Creature? Anyway, whatever it is doesn't seem to be able to use the pressure lock, and the sub is just how she left it.

Thank goodness for opposable thumbs. She plugs Catherine into the sub's omnitool port; now that there's a cortex chip present they should be able to get more out of the computers.

"..ul," Catherine says. "What?....Oh, huh. What's this. CURIE escape vessel four. Margaret, can you hear me?"

"I hear you. Can you tell what kind of shape the shuttle is in?"

"It's got power, and the computers look intact. Hard to say what the propulsion systems look like without trying them." The door swings shut and the cabin lights flicker to life. After a moment, there's a whine and a rumble, which becomes a rattle, which becomes the entire cabin shaking. The motor shuts off with a bang. "Sorry, it's dead," Catherine says. "This EV came from the CURIE, the supply vessel we used between Lambda and Lisbon. The EV computer thinks the wreck might be around here someplace. We might be able to find another shuttle like this one there."

"Okay. Does it say roughly what direction it's in or do I need to go walk in a spiral?" She really hopes it's the former; getting lost on the seabed until she dies of generalized increasing entropy is not great even by the standards of all the ways to die she's encountered today.

"North, towards the hills, "Catherine says. "You should just be able to follow the exterior path towards Theta--it looks like it's really close. Let me just save the ship's security information and update the Omnitool...There. That should help you get around," Catherine says.

"Okay. Um, anything else you want to do before we go?" Margaret doesn't have anything in mind; it just seems rude to unplug Catherine again so quickly.

"Not really," Catherine says. "I'm just...still thinking about why you're here. You just woke up at Upsilon, no clue how?"

"Yeah. And you woke up in that robot, and even if that could have been you, why didn't you stick around to catch yourself up on everything? And what happened to Carl? It's--weird." Now that she lays it all out that really is a lot of underexplained body-swapping."

"I..don't know. Reed had found...well, I'd thought the WAU might be stealing brain scans, but I had no idea what for."

"Stealing brain scans? How smart is the WAU, anyway?"

"It's a station-wide artificial intelligence, but it's not really a persona."

"So the WAU, what, never reports having subjective experiences? What can it do--use language, understand language, make plans, describe images, operate robots in arbitrary real-world environments?"

"It's just a simple system for maintaining station equilibrium, or at least that's what Sarang always said. It doesn't talk, it doesn't control anything other than computer interlinks and life support systems. it's not like it's from some old science fiction show. It's just...everywhere. Like a cancer, but we...Reed and I...I'd found that it was incorporating brain scans into itself, based on some of the early work I'd done on the ARK. I don't know why, I don't know if the me that I was ever found out."

"I mean, unless someone specifically gave the WAU the ability to incorporate brain scans then there's some ability to model an environment and generate new possible actions and choose between them. Unless, and I apologize for how much this sounds like a crazy idea from someone who's read too much science fiction, someone incorporated one brain scan into the WAU and that one, uh, took over somehow and now there's some kind of modified human running the show."

"I don't know, it just sounds crazy. I don't see how it helps us launch the ARK, though."

"Launching the ARK is definitely the priority. Though, uh. If it's still on Earth, does that mean more people can be loaded into it?"

"Yeah, probably."

Oh, thank goodness, she has a chance of ever being somewhere other than this.

"Then it kind of does matter whether the WAU is a person, right? Though I guess the WAU being able to interact with brain scans doesn't mean we can do the reverse. We should definitely try to get Amy and Carl out though, if the equipment is still around."

"Yes, but we should focus on getting to Theta--once we have the DUNBAT, it'll be easier to go back to Upsilon, and we'll know if we can even get down to the abyss or if we have to go to Omicron for the climber." 

"Yeah, that makes sense. Oh, when I get to the CURIE, should I just plug you into whichever sub looks to be in the best shape or do you want to check out the ship itself?"

"From the story the escape vessel's computer is telling, I don't expect the CURIE itself to be in usable shape, but you might have a look? Any escape vessel should be fine, though."

"Alright. Okay if I disconnect you now?" She is not going to accidentally pull her out in the middle of a word again; she is going to be polite. 

"Yeah, I'll be fine, Just be sure to plug me in at some point." Catherine says.

"Okay, here goes." And she disconnects Catherine and exits the sub. If there's nothing immediately threatening or fascinating outside, she hikes off toward the hill behind which is supposedly the CURIE.

The path to Theta seems a bit more improved than the surface paths in the seabed around Upsilon, with a line of lights along cleared seabed for at least a little while. It becomes clear some of the wreckage around Lambda must be from CURIE, as the density of random beams and structures increases as she goes along.It's enough to start almost being peaceful, before there's the telltale flicker of electronic noise in her qualia. Up ahead, and coming her way, is one of the monsters. It looks similar to the one in Lambda, a humanoid figure with a glowing blob for a head, though it's hard to tell since the flicker in Margaret's visual field seems to be synchronized to its motion in the debris such that she never sees it moving, it's only closer along the path every time her vision flickers.

That's really screwed up and disturbing and she wants her senses to work but at least it serves as a warning. She runs away again, and gets back to the path well on the far side of the figure. (She used to wave hello to strangers coming up the road, yesterday last century.)

Leaving the figure behind for the moment, Margaret comes across an area where a section of the ship has fallen like a wall across the path.

She tries climbing up it, fails to get purchase, and goes around to the other end where there's a torn seam she can force wider with her crowbar to get inside.

The opening leads into a small internal hallway, clearly torn from the ship, blocked by the rockfall on the end she just entered near. Making her way further along, there's a door which hangs half-open but jammed.

Can she pry it off, and if that doesn't work can she cut it off?

The application of the crowbar is enough to force the door open far enough to squeeze through. She can feel the pressure on the side of the suit as she forces her way though the gap, and then she's through into a small chamber at the end of the section of hull. The hallway's continuation ends with another section of rock wall and crumpled metal, but a ladder leads up into what looks like a maintenance conduit.

She has no particular reason to expect this not to get to a dead end eventually, but so far it's easier than trying to scale the outside, so up into the maintenance conduit she goes.

The maintenance passageway dodges around a couple short turns, and finally out through a grating in the side of the ship, leaving her on the far side of the obstruction. Beyond, the path is less clear, covered with larger sections of wreckage and large rocks the size of small boulders. Even more sections of what look like a ship's hull lie scattered around, one bearing the name "MS CURIE" in faded white paint, before a turn around it brings Margaret to view of a large structure rising from the seabed. It looks, on first impressions, less like a ship, and more like an oil platform or a bunch of buildings rising on a pylon from the sea bed. Various booms, cranes, and catwalks hang off the platform at various heights in the structure rising above Margaret as she walks around it. It looks like it's being stabilized by several giant tentacables, some with spines, several almost a foot in diameter. More than a little damage is visible, as some of the platforms look twisted at right angles. At the base, where the pylon spears into the ground, a rip in the hull promises entry to the interior.

It's sufficiently intact to register as a damaged ship rather than undifferentiated human-made debris, and sufficiently beautiful to be depressing in its brokenness. She wonders as she goes inside how many skyscrapers are still standing on the surface, and how long it will be before the last one falls.

The inside has a few lights on, and the doors work, including, annoyingly, some safety-locked hatches Margaret can't get open. Still, she can make her way inside and through some of the hatches. The interior is a mess of stairs, catwalks, and winding passages. One, in particular, seems notable--it's a staircase going entirely perpendicular to the one she's on, without intersecting it, and which looks like it dead-ends straight into a vertical wall. What's stranger is that the railing, on closer inspection, seems set up for somebody to climb the staircase starting from standing on the wall.

That's very M.C. Escher, and implies that this ship was intended to be usable in a couple different orientations. Fortunately one of them is the one it's currently in, so she can navigate without climbing across surfaces meant to be ceilings.

It doesn't take much time to cross through hallways and out an intact hatch that leads out onto one of the catwalks suspended over the open ocean floor below. The way down is torn and wrecked, but the way up looks clear. Up a few flights of stairs, another hatch leads back into the ship and into what looks like a bunkroom. A few lockers lined the walls, one of which has been knocked to the floor in the ship's collision, but there's also bunk beds, a deck, and some shelves. Through a window into a hallway, there's a sign visible saying "Escape Vessel" and pointing up a ladder. Unfortunately, there's no door next to the window, only out another wall and into a short corridor.

She's at least going to try getting to that ladder via doors before she considers getting through the window. What's down that corridor?

Down the hall, the corridor ducks around a corner. On the left is a small workroom. If there was any doubt about the infiltration of the WAU, the growth in the corner seems to answer it--it's definitely here, too. There's a skull, and what looks like part of the rest of a body on the slab. But only part, even with the decay. To the right, a hatch leads into some kind of...lounge, apparently, some of the furniture and couches scattered against the walls. The room is lit in red by a screen on the wall, showing flickering views of towers of smoke and flame. A voice is repeating on a loop, barely audible through the water. "...sky is pitch black with smoke. The ocean is dark, incredibly dark. In the distance, I can see land. According to navigation, it's Lisbon and the coast of Portugal. The flames...everything's on fire. The flames are reaching up into the sky, it's unreal." There's a tingle up Margaret's spine, and it takes a moment to realize it's a static twinge of the feeling the monsters give her, not nerves.

Everyone's dead, everyone's dead . . . she's going to be dead too if she doesn't keep moving. There's not a lot of room to dodge, in here, and she can't afford to let the stranger get between her and the escape vessel.

The Curie is a tight warren of passages, and the lounge lets out through two doors. Coming to the second, the twinge up her spine becomes a roiling electric burn and her vision starts to flicker. There's a sound in the hallway, just beyond the second door out of the lounge, the one further from the one she came in from. Clump. Clump. The thing is in the hall. 

If she just holds still the thing might go past without coming in here (and holding still is easier than trying to move with her brain feeling like it's melting), but if she doesn't get lucky she's going to have to go back the way she came in a hurry. She holds still in a corner and hopes her awful spider-sense doesn't go both ways.

The footsteps in the hall continue, and for a moment, Margaret can see the light from the glowing head of something like the monster from earlier, before it goes around the corner. The way out the second door is clear for the moment.

She forces herself to wait a little longer, give it a bit more time to get out of earshot miscellaneous sensory ranges or give herself a bit more head start, but then she goes for it. Slowly and stealthily, because being faster than most things down here in a straight line doesn't help as much when she doesn't have a known clear path.

The hallway leads around the lounge, back towards the area where she saw the ladder marked. Off to the sides, short corridors and closed doors promise other rooms, and a door (unlocked) apparently, blocks her way ahead. For the moment, whatever that thing was seems to have missed her.

Good. She is so missable. She is boring and uninteresting and definitely doesn't taste good. Straight ahead seems most promising if the door will open, either immediately or with the omnitool.

The door slides open as she pulls on it, and for once the sound-deadening of the water works for her, muffling any rattle the already-rusting door might have had. It takes two heaves to haul the door open enough to get past, and beyond she can see the hallway with the ladder access.

Great. Now there just has to actually be a working escape vessel where the sign says there is.

The ladder access holds the answers, hopefully, but unfortunately, it's currently raised through a hatch that looks like it's for when the ship is oriented the other way--a ladder runs along the ceiling in mind-bending fashion. There's a wheel on the wall to lower it.

Time to lower the ladder as quickly as possible and hope it doesn't creak loud enough to wake the undead!

The ladder drops loose with a rattle, hits the deck with a clank, and there's a screeching from down the hall.

Yeah that was a stupid hope even by recent standards of the stupidity of hope. Up she goes at top speed, aiming to get to the top and pull the ladder up behind her. At least she still has the increased upper body strength.

The way up passes through a narrow constriction--some kind of thicker bulkhead--before leaving her on a deck straight out of an Escher painting, with a staircase across the room, a ladder on the floor, and a disorienting arrangement of hatches and doors. Behind her, there's a grunting moan, and the light of the entity's...head. It's human, or it was. There's a human body sticking out of a mass of the structure gel, coating its head and arms, with glowing spots all over it. It doesn't seem to be human intelligence now, though--it doesn't look up as it surveys the corridor below, it doesn't even look hard at the newly lowered ladder.

So a zombie, as opposed to the earlier vampire. Stupid fake taxonomy later, pulling up the ladder and getting to the escape vessel now. She considers trying to clap prime numbers at the entity first, in case there's a mind in there and the not climbing the ladder is more of a dexterity thing, but--the last couple strange language-users she met tried to attack her. This one might only be confused about where she's gone. And she's so scared and lost and exhausted in a way that electricity can't fix and she just. Can't handle trying to establish communication with an alien mind right now. She turns around and moves on.

The room she's in is some kind of storage space, with a corridor on her right that looks, dizzyingly, like it's a stairwell in the other orientation. A door to the left offers a set of corridors, and just down the hall is a passage up and to the escape vessel. It's just like the one outside Lambda, except this one is in better condition, with a little less barnacles and weeds inside it.

That's a relief. She plugs in Catherine and asks, "So, the humans with giant blobs of gel on their heads, what is their deal?"

"What?" Catherine asks. "Oh, you found another escape vessel, good. I don't know what their deal is, they're just like...exploding with electromagnetic energy."

"Oh, is that why they make me feel ill, like they're magnets and I'm a CRT . . . wait, you've probably never heard of CRTs, it's the future. Um. Anyway. Does this escape vessel look functional to you?"

"It looks better, let's see if we can't get this thing moving," Catherine says. "Uh, wait, what. Safety locks are blocking the vessel's release? How much more of an emergency can it be in? It's on the bottom of the ocean!"

"Argggghhhh." So many remembered engineering lectures about Design Principles and graceful failure and what things should or shouldn't have manual overrides, with the main takeaway being 'for all x there are circumstances in which x is awful'.

"Is there a way to release it anyway? Including by finding the sensor that's objecting and either breaking it or shorting it?"

"Take a look at the engine room, maybe you can figure it out. Maybe there's an override or something."

"Alright. There's a chance I might break it worse, but I guess it's already unusable. I can narrate what I'm doing if you'll be able to hear me from there; I don't know what kind of intercom this place has."

"Not much, unfortunately. You'll be on your own out there."

"Okay. I'll do my best." She turns to leave the escape vessel and go looking for the engine room. It would have been good to have Catherine and her up-to-date knowledge in her ear to run things past, but she's done pretty well at avoiding surprises from the (non-sentient) hardware around here so far. (She tries not to think about what that means for the last eighty years' rate of technological progress. It's all moot now anyway.)

The corridor winds on, through a galley oriented for two different directions of down and abandoned mess tables and the floating detritus of life, from clothes to empty bottles and cans, through to some kind of command center. A message plays on repeat, spurred by whatever caused the crash. "Attention crew, this is your captain speaking. The final efforts to stop the comet have, officially, failed. Impact is...imminent." Nothing immediately stands out as the "unlock lifeboats" button, though. 

If she were an escape vessel control panel, where would she hide . . . . Margaret starts cleaning the algae off consoles, figuring out what each one was for (or trying to) before moving on, working her way from one end to the other. Except after about two consoles she switches to looking for the speaker that's repeating that message so she can disable it.

By the door leading into the next corridor, on the other side of the ship, there's a panel hidden under some stairs--a stack of servers and a flickering display screen. It's overgrown with structure gel polyps and a large bulb, covering portions of the glowing lights--the only set of controls that still look active. Through the algea, Margaret can read __MAGE __ONTR__, and elsewhere beyond some of the tentacables, __ENCY IN__COM___. More is hard to make out beyond the overgrowth, and the large WAU energy bulb covering much of the front of the still-active console.

She's pretty stuck on the first one, but that second one is probably "Emergency Intercom". If she clears away some of the obstruction she might find the switch to stop that awful constantly repeating message. Actually maybe she should "eat" first, just in case she damages the bulb trying to get at the panel. Who knows when she'll get the chance again, after all.

There's the flickering, electric rush in her senses as her body does...whatever it does to the bulb. As it dies down, some of the lights flicker out on the console, and the recording dies out in a few last fragments..."officially...failed....failed....failed." The ship is left alone, and chooses that moment to give a slight groan as some deep-ocean current shakes it on its pylon. Clearing away some of the algea, it looks like the bulb was growing over some kind of emergency power hookup, next to a switch that's labeled "lifeboat release," but it looks like the switch has been forced by the tentacables erupting from its housing from "RELEASE" or "OFF" to "LOCK".