"Oh, those both sound really helpful." She starts on booting up the test ARK, now that the computers are responsive.

The test version of the ARK seems a little buggy still, as it's got far more modules loaded into it as options than the system it's hooked to can run at once. The system only has a few petabytes of active storage, and several of the packages are hundreds of terabytes with the option for selecting all at once totaling two or three petabytes. Sorting out the redundancies and dependencies is tedious, but at least it's fairly specific about which modules depends on which other modules.

It's kind of reassuring, in a way, that the full ARK world is that much data. Makes it feel more likely to feel, not real exactly, but not stripped-down, from the inside. Also looking at parts of the code makes it feel more real in the sense that she starts having hope she'll actually get there, which she was trying to avoid because she expected it would hurt. It does hurt.

She starts disabling leaf-node packages, and then disabling the packages that those packages depended on, and so on down the tree until she has just the core packages and a small handful of add-ons that all fits in memory. (A few petabytes of RAM is about 20 doublings over what she remembers for consumer hardware, so Moore's law definitely slowed down or stopped eventually, but it got quite a ways along first and who knows what other tradeoffs this system is making.)

Before the simulation fires up, the test ARK wants her to select a set of options for the occupant. There's the same list of options from the storage banks in the scan room, Margaret herself, David Munshi, a few others, and one marked "DUMMY".

"All right, great," Catherine says. "Load in the dummy scan, and I can see how I did this before. Once it's running, slow down the clock rate, and then pause it and run the diagnostics."

She does as instructed. "What's the dummy," she asks idly, "an interface for a brain scan with no implementation behind it, or not even that?"

"Yeah, it's a completely original composite I made for debugging the ARK before we got the scans fully working, attempting to see how the 3ns scans would interface with the environment wrappers," Catherine says.

"That's definitely better than testing it on yourself."

Eventually the basic-version ARK finishes compiling.

The simulation starts up, and the Margaret is able to pause it and start the diagnostics. "Ohhh," Catherine says. "I see. The implementation makes so much sense that way--such a perfect way to manage the memory resources and the sensory input handling is so precise."

"Sounds like you agree with your other self? That's good." Margaret really hopes that if there were two of her in the same place at the same time they would usually agree on things. Disagreeing with herself would be weird and embarrassing.

"Oh," Catherine says, startled. "Uh, yeah, I guess I do. I guess this must be what you feel like?"

"Honestly it feels like a mix of that and discovering I had a famous grandmother or something. Just because the time gap is so big and I wasn't expecting it. But honestly, yeah, there's also some amount of pride even though I don't have any of that knowledge and wisdom now, just from knowing that--I'm the sort of person who can do that. . . . I hope I live up to it."

"Hmm," Catherine says. "I think Sarang had a copy of your book, if it's knowledge you're after. Anyway, I think I can turn this over for a bit. Why don't we get the scan done, and then you can look for the Omnitool while I compare the results and make sure we'll be able to transfer you into the ARK?"

She wrote a book? Of course she wrote a book. Too bad it didn't stop Sarang from starting a cult, but then, she's nervous enough about dying while backed up after having already done it once that anything she wrote beforehand wouldn't help. Anyway.

"Sure. Do I just climb in the payload scanner?"

"Yep," Catherine says confidently. The sign on the outside with a large radiation trefoil and the words, "NOT FOR HUMAN SCANNING" stand out noticeably.

Good thing she's not human and will either get in the ARK or die of something else before she can get cancer. Still. "Quick check, this definitely isn't going to kill me on a scale of hours to days, right?"

"I don't think so," Catherine says. "It shouldn't be acute, anyway."

"Alright." She shuts down the thought of saying 'If I keel over immediately it's your fault', because that would Not be funny and also if she dies Catherine will suffer more than she does don't think about that either.

Margaret gets in the scanner.

The scanner is the size of a small bedroom, large enough to accept something the size of a small car. Once Margaret's inside and standing in the center, there's a click and the door slides closed, and then a large set of rotating devices sweep rapidly around the room several times for a minute or so. A few moments after it stops, the door opens back up. "Come take a look at this," Catherine says. By the time Margaret can get out, Catherine has volumetric X-rays pulled up on the pair of displays outside the scanner. There's the shadow of the suit, and then...body, with half its head missing. A boxy object is situation down in the torso, and there's another jammed into the spinal column. A secondary display shows, "USERNAME: Reed, Imogene."

She looks like a pile of garbage some teenagers threw together in a basement and she's still stronger and more durable than when she was a human. If it was possible to actually design bodies of structure gel and computer hardware, with chassis better suited to the job than "human-shaped diving suit", the potential is pretty impressive. Still not as good as ditching it all for the ARK, though, under the circumstances, so maybe none of it will come to anything. Damn comet, humanity wasn't done.

Enough imaginary futures and alternate pasts. She has a present to deal with. "Does it look like my hardware can be read from alright? It looks a bit . . .buried."

"I think that's just a power cell," Catherine says. "You're definitely on a cortex chip, the same as I am. It should be easy enough to read from the standard ports. I wonder if the body plan makes any difference compared to the other robots we've seen around? A sound mind in a sound body, the best of both worlds, or something like that."

"You think I didn't go crazy because I'm not horribly injured or attached to a wall? . . . Honestly when I put it like that it sounds pretty plausible."

"That's what I'm thinking," Catherine says. "Of course, I'm just plugged into a wall too, but maybe I was more prepared for it?"

"Hm. I'd definitely rather be me than you right now because skipping chunks of time and not being able to move around sound unpleasant--uh, if there's anything I should be doing to make that less unpleasant please tell me--but I don't think I'd go insane if we suddenly switched. On the other hand, we're both way better off than Carl or Amy. Robin was sort of in-between and I get the impression she didn't get more insane while she was stuck to the seabed? I don't know how much people go crazy from--helplessness and isolation--even without the apocalypse coming into it."

Wow, listing all the very good reasons people have to despair is kind of depressing and the fact that she has fewer such reasons than anyone else doesn't help as much as you'd think.

"Mmm," Catherine says, non-committedly. "I wonder what Reed was doing at Upsilon? She should have been here, at Theta."

"Wait, so does that mean Imogene was the . . . previous person, uh, using this diving suit?"