this isn't much worse

> PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Liv
PRONOUNS: She/her
AGE: 29
CONTACT: chirality

> CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Catherine Chun
CANON: SOMA
AGE: By perception, 37. Technically, like 3 days.
CANON POINT: Post-game as Catherine-2 (rather than Catherine-3, who was uploaded onto the ARK)

HISTORY: Wikia link
PERSONALITY: Catherine Chun was a "quiet mouse" of a person, easily bullied and stepped on by others, as described by the psychologist that saw her. What flashbacks we get of the fully human living Catherine (Catherine-1) seem to support this: she unnerves others with how detached she is, how focused on her work to the exclusion of human sympathy, and overall with how reclusive she is. Catherine considered and still does consider herself difficult to like and as a human that was never more true. Her self-described happy memory is still about being alone, overlooking the city of Taipei, fully removed from the scurrying people she describes below. Catherine does express some remorse and confusion about this state of affairs, but seems to morosely accept it: she rarely brings it up, but when she does, seems certain she has no real friends and that no one wants to be.

Many of Catherine-1's traits are seen in Catherine-2, the brain scan that we interact with throughout the game. She is sure no one really likes her, she is intensely focused on her work in a rather off-putting, unsympathetic way, and it's easy to see why she'd unnerve people with her questionable morality. She repeatedly tells Simon that "robots don't have feelings" despite sort of being one herself, and when they discover that inside Simon's dive suit is the corpse of another person, Imogen Reed, an old coworker of Cath's, Simon's understandable response of how gross it is is met with Cath's defensive, Hey, she was my-- she was nice to me. It's a great illustration of why Catherine meets with social problems, and just how persistent her reluctance is to claim anyone as friend.

But the similarities don't go on forever. Catherine-2 might be a copy of Catherine-1, but being a machine changes her. Catherine-2 expresses that she'd never felt comfortable being human in the first place, and it's easy to believe. Far from being a quiet mouse, she's bossy, dryly sarcastic, and frequently impatient with Simon's body horror, confusion over their circumstances, fear of the WAU-infested monsters pursuing them-- just about anything that isn't fulfilling her task in launching the ARK. Catherine is clear-eyed and determined, much as Catherine-1 was after the scan. They both saw the ARK as heroic, as saving humanity, probably mostly because they both see life as a scan to be fulfilling and even freeing. Those that killed themselves upon scan, the continuity enthusiasts, confused both of them. We see Catherine-1 distraught in a flashback recording and read her directly say she doesn't understand how continuity suicide is supposed to make sense in a written journal entry; Catherine-2 expresses similar feelings.

To Catherine, logical understanding supercedes all feelings, and always has. It explains a lot of her social difficulty. She's self-aware enough to realize that it's a problem, and the way she seems to have landed on coping with it is by keeping things to herself. For how chatty she can be, she's not very forthcoming about her own feelings (implying a lack of self-examination or comprehension, perhaps) and in glaring omission she never really addresses just how bleak their circumstances are, or how the end of human life has impacted her.

It doesn't explain everything, though, because Catherine is actually quite chipper and humorous as a scan. It would make sense to assume that Catherine-1 never felt comfortable enough to express that, and indeed we don't see anything to indicate that she ever did, but we do find toys in her room in Theta. Clearly she's always had a fondness for lightheartedness; she'd just never felt free to express it as a human. As a digital human, Catherine-2 is social and friendly with Simon, even if she is constantly impatient with his lack of understanding.

Catherine is a smart person and an earnest one. She has good intentions, and more than that, the ability and the willpower to carry them through. That being said, she's not unwilling to make sacrifices along the way-- her own consciousness being trapped and left behind as Catherine-2, having lost the coin toss to get on the ARK, in circumstances no less futile and hopeless than Simon-3's. Yet unlike Simon, who lives in denial up until the end, Catherine knew what she was doing all along. She agreed to copy herself onto the ARK without delay-- and with full knowledge that one of her would be left behind. That she didn't sit Simon down and explain to him just what that choice and other choices mean is definitely a large flaw in her, but at the end of the day, Catherine is someone who chases hope. No matter where it leads her.

She's a surprisingly upbeat character for such a bleak game.

CRAU: Nope!

SPECIES: She's technically a brain scan of a person and therefore a computer program, but in-game she'll be back to being a normal ol' human.
APPEARANCE: We only get 2-3 canon images of Catherine, so I've picked a PB for her -- Constance Wu.

SKILLS: Catherine is an engineer specializing in A.I. and robotics, and she can design and code something similar to virtual reality environments real enough to accurately simulate normal life. In canon, her ultimate work in creating one is the ARK, a complex, multi-faceted digital reality as expansive as a city and with multiple natural habitats besides. Of course, the consciousnesses that inhabit these environments can't exist there and inhabit a human body at the same time-- so, she developed technology to scan a person's brain using a pilot seat, normally used to remotely pilot robotic helpers, and take an image of their mind. It's usually a procedure used to create templates for patterning A.I. personalities off of, but Catherine uses it to preserve the full and complete complexity of a human mind and person. She herself in her incarnation here is one of these scans.

The problem is that these scans are copies, fully-fledged separate human beings with complete individuality from the original at the time they were scanned or their files were copied. They can inhabit her designed environments, or they can be housed on a cortex chip (a microchip), like she and Simon are, and inhabit a robotic or cybernetic body. Her abilities are integral to the plot of SOMA, and with the right equipment and time she could replicate the ARK and/or make scans of people, but for obvious reasons, it isn't likely to pan out well in an RP setting, as any use of this technology would create duplicates of characters. Also, it's more than a little horrifying for people who don't know what they're fully getting into, and Catherine only scans or copies willing people. She's pretty spooked about the idea of doing it again at all after Simon's reactions in canon.

Mostly in-game I anticipate her abilities being very useful with sci fi settings regarding A.I. and coding and any potential virtual realities, but in a more real-world context of just being skilled with those topics.

NEW POWER: Robot puppetry -- any robot Catherine builds by hand can be remotely controlled by her. In its initial, smallest form, this will only enable her to pick up video and audio from their sensors at a distance, as if she were seeing/hearing those things herself. Physical movement would still have to be mechanically programmed or controlled.
POWER REASONING: Catherine's whole personality is built around her work; she's a socially awkward person and more than a bit of a workaholic. And, indeed, the whole plot of the game revolves around her work as well. It seems inevitable and necessary that any power she gets would be based off of robotics and A.I., and this method doesn't interfere with metaplot and setting!

> SAMPLES
SAMPLE ONE: Log thread
SAMPLE TWO: Log thread