[ It’s not like being scanned and uploaded, what he’d called waking up when it was more like being teleported, and having done something to trigger it. This is like actually waking up, except without ever having slept, somehow.

The last thing Simon remembers is the error message flashing on the Launch Dome’s terminal, white against black. The cold encroaching realization that this, ending up somewhere unfamiliar like a wayward science experiment, would never happen again — that he was in the last place he’d ever see, the bottom of the infested ocean, the sole remaining sapient thing on Earth, until his battery ran down, or the WAU died and took him with it.

No digital paradise. No Catherine— and at the thought of her the sudden stab of loss, and regret, and utter unmoored helplessness is enough to needle through the cottony wall of sedation. Sort of. It’s rounded the points on the rest of the confusion and anxiety, the crawling unease over the scar on his head. What the fuck is that about?

He doesn’t feel the weight of the Power Suit; doesn’t see a robotic exoskeleton. He’s human. Not exactly like he originally was, his missing-as-of-like-six-hours-ago forearm now healed rather than a ragged stump, but still. Human. He leans against a wall and turns his remaining hand over in front of him, looking himself over to a degree that’s probably unusual for new arrivals, at stuff that their mysterious kidnappers didn’t experiment on. ]

[ and then he stumbles out of the alley, trying to get his bearings, and it’s totally oktoberfest

ok

???

Simon squints at the sun. That sure is the sun, and that sure is a crowd of people, both of which were normal components of his life what seems like yesterday, but suddenly feel bizarrely foreign.

Before long, two people have given the confused, poorly-dressed amputee caveperson beers insistently enough that he takes them, for some reason?¿?, holding them in the crook of his right elbow.

When he spots someone else dressed similarly, he finally asks: ]

This can’t be it. Can it? The ARK?

[ First of all, he remembers losing the coin toss.

Second of all, Oktoberfest doesn’t seem like a very Catherine thing to implement. Those are only two of the many problems with this possibility, but it’s the only thing he can think of. ]

[ In 2104, he’d asked Catherine if it had really been just one day — this, the longest day of his life, since he woke up in Upsilon, and that moment feels like it was eons ago, which it technically was, and somebody’s been doing surgery on his fucking brain. Simon heads to the least populated place in the safehouse and yanks at his shirt to see the thing in his chest, faintly luminescent and metal-parasite blue.

He can be found pacing the bathroom looking like sweaty ass, mouth a thin line and breathing fast through his nose in the typical manner of somebody trying to squelch a panic attack the counterproductive way. ]

[ The communal aspect of the safehouse isn’t terrible. It’s a little like a dorm... for abductees. It's an awkward collision of his human and not-human existences, to think that this is like a dorm all while trying to get the hatch open, then pacing the medical bay and storage rooms doing mechanical visual sweeps. The sort of searching that he wishes were for something in particular and is more socially acceptable in a zombie apocalypse where none of these things belong to anyone (some of this stuff clearly does, or did, once). Nor are they subject to any social mores saying you can't just rifle through them.

He has the wherewithal to half-cross his arms, right over left, though consistently hiding, or even consistently remembering, that he’s missing half an arm takes more focus than Simon has when he’s trying to do the “piece together how I time traveled to somewhere weird and horrible” thing.

He doesn’t like that this thing in his head... exists, but it’s better than doing nothing, especially in a place with no paper media, no personal affects — even missing his wallet is disorienting, now that it should conceivably be there and he’s not in a diving suit.

So, in the kitchen (the best place to stand around messing with your phone), he starts trying to sift through the deluge of information. One might assume that the hands-free nature of neural implants would be perfect in Simon’s situation, but every so often he reflexively tries to scroll on it with his finger like it’s a touchscreen anyway.

you know what else the kitchen is good for ]

You know, this is exactly what we were afraid would happen to books in 2015.

[ striking up conversations instead of thinking about how This Shit Again and how the internet is inside you ]

[ or something else!! feel free to hmu at honchkrow if you want a personalized starter or come at me with another thing ]