Weren't the crew already doomed before WAU

[SlackerinDeNile]

Well, for one, our current understanding of how the human brain works is virtually non-existant, so making informed comparisons on that front would be extraordinarily difficult.

That being said, I imagine that the actual "data" of a brain scan would be insanely complex. Like, it would make Google's neural network algorithms look like chicken scratch. Even Catherine, who has spent her entire life studying these kinds of things and who invented the ARK, cannot just browse through the data and expect to understand it. It's not going to be like some XML file with all the memory fields clearly indexed, or even something that would even be remotely human-readable.

As an example, try using any old text editor or hex editor and open up a PNG image file. You might be expecting to find all the pixel data somewhere along with perhaps some metadata information describing the image itself. What you would actually find is a bunch of nonsense that a human couldn't hope to interpret as image data. That's because the image has been run through a compression algorithm that makes it easy for computers to read it as well as store it in a smaller file, but at the cost of losing human readability. Take that concept and multiply it by a million, and that's what a brain scan would probably look like.

They might have some program somewhere they can run to try and brute force their way into recovering the information from the scan data, but it would likely be error prone and take forever (I'm talking weeks or months), and any more "intelligent" program would probably be doing more or less the same thing that Catherine and Simon were doing anyway.

And his name is Brandon Wan, by the way.

Okay, fair enough, that was a big error on my part.

And yes, I edited the post with the correct character name, thanks.