"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.