The building where they're doing the brain scans isn't that far from campus, so it's not hard for Margaret to show up a few minutes early. She brought some homework to work on if they're not ready for her yet, but it turns out she's too excited (and maybe also nervous) to focus on Engineering Systems Design right now. She double checks the room number in the recruitment email and knocks.
Catherine sighs. "Until we launch the ark, none of them...none of us are really safe, anyway. We need to stay focused on that. If there's no one around to ask in person, is there anything left in the scan library? I had some offline backups planned off the research room, maybe we have something on chip still from when I was copying them to the ARK. If part of the security team is on there, they might know the cypher."
"No, I doubt it. Reed was a mechatronics engineer, and Konrad was a wrangler here. Neither of them would be likely to know much about the security setup," Catherine says.
"Would you have put copies of the scans anywhere other than the ARK?" If not, they may have done an equivalent of locking their keys in their car, except that both the keys and the car are other people's brains.
"Yeah, there should be a storage room off the research lab, I was planning to have offline backups there," Catherine says.
"Great." Off she goes to the storage room. If past Catherine was anything like present Catherine, they'll be well-organized and clearly labeled.
Perhaps they were, but the large racks of data modules seem to have suffered a rough time in the last few months. The support equipment they're plugged into here is offline, which seems to have been where the labels was, and a power line fallen from the ceiling has shorted across several banks. Finally, Margaret finds a single working chip, the size of a portable hard drive, labeled "Scan Data #12" which looks intact. It looks like it'd fit the slot on the simulation computer nearby in the research lab.
She plugs it in and brings up the file system while asking Catherine, "What names should I be looking for here?"
"I'm not sure, anyone on the security team is worth a shot," Catherine says. "Cronstedt, Overseer Fourqueen, maybe, or Grau? Or one of the Warnglers, Strohmeier could pull them in if he needed a little muscle to break something up."
The sim computer pulls up a message "Loading: Slot 2: Scans" for a moment, then shows a list:
That turns out to be a useful list compared to Catherine's suggestions. Lindwall's a payload technician, Sarang an intelligence analyst and data scientist, Bass a field service technician, Koster a payload engineer, Wolchezk a site service engineer, Strasky a dispatcher, and Komorebi a medical expert...but Brandon Wan was a wrangler, apparently seconded to Strohmeier after arriving as a "refugee" from Delta, another site Margaret hasn't visited yet.
"Looks like our best bet is Brandon Wan. Important question: are the people in the ARK already conscious?"
"Okay. Well, we might end up with two Brandons--and two Robins--but if you're sure there's no other way forward I'll run him."
She's trying hard not to freak out about this. It's not that she expects having two of Brandon to cause any horrible trouble, but she can't ask him in advance and it would be so reasonable of him to be mad at her about it.
"Well, we shouldn't need to run Robin, and we'd only have an extra Brandon as long as we keep him running," Catherine says. "He's still in the ARK either way, this would just be...a spare copy for a while to help get the ARK launched."
"I told the Robin in my pocket I'd run her at least long enough to tell her if she was in the ARK or not. I guess we can't know what Brandon wants until we ask him, but we shouldn't fork someone without being prepared for the possibility that both forks will want to live."
"Alright. Here goes."
It would be very appropriate to gulp, here. She cannot gulp. She boots up Brandon Wan.
The simulation takes a moment to load, then a rendered video appears of a man in a scan chair in a swiss chalet, in front of a cozy-looking fire.
"That wasn't so bad," he says. "Strohmeier really got me worked up, the bastard." He pauses, seeming to take in the room. "Wha...what is this? Where am I?" His "stress levels" start spiking.
Brandon puts his hands on the arms of the chair, looking to pull himself up. "Dr. Chun? What the hell is this place?"
"It's a virtual environment that isn't the ARK," says Margaret. "Catherine and I--my name's Margaret; we haven't met--are trying to launch the ARK into space, but we need your help to get down to Tau."
"I'm an old brain scan who got woken up down here by accident, and I'm trying to get myself into the ARK and launch it. We--Catherine and I--need the new security cipher to get to the DUNBAT."